GitPython

I believe the title exactly tells what I'll talk about - using Git on Python. As one knows, Python is an open-source software, with a bunch of libraries developed and distributed by a huge community.

In fact, nearly everything you can think about already exists on Python. As an avid ggplot2 user, I remember the day that I was so thrilled when I found out most functionalities of the graphing library are available with plotnine (opens in a new tab).

That being said, it is pretty predicted and inevitable that there should be tools to support Git on Python.Git is at the core of distribution of open-source software.

So, GitPython (opens in a new tab) does the work.

First install as usual.

pip users: pip install gitpython anaconda users: conda install gitpython

Note: conda-forge has newer versions, but I don't think the version difference is meaningful in terms of its core operations.

Codes below are sample from my own, and I believe basic commit and push operations will be similar.

from git import Repo
 
repo_dir = '/Users/minpark/Documents/Github/nCOV-summary'
repo = Repo(repo_dir)
file_list = ['file_to_be_pushed.txt']
msg = 'commit from python'
 
commit_message = msg
repo.index.add(file_list)
repo.index.commit(commit_message)
origin = repo.remote('origin')
origin.pull()
origin.push()

As it turns out, the module name is git! This means it will likely be the first tool for git operations on Python.

As described in the codes above, the basic steps are fairly standard.

1. Import git module
2. Set local git repository folder
3. Set files to be committed and commit msg
4. Do commit by `repo.index.add` and `repo.index.commit`
5. Set remote git repository
6. Pull remote repository to local
7. Push committed changes to remote repository

The most important part is pull command. When I tried to commit and push without pull even when I hadn't made changes remotely beforehand, this operation were rejected. Only after I added pull operation before push in my code, it worked.

While it should be a straightforward step to register this on crontab to automate regular git operation, it didn't work to my favor. I resorted to launchd instead, about which I wrote in a separate article.