Documentation/git-fast-export.txt

git-fast-export(1)
==================

NAME
----
git-fast-export - Git data exporter


SYNOPSIS
--------
[verse]
'git fast-export [options]' | 'git fast-import'

DESCRIPTION
-----------
This program dumps the given revisions in a form suitable to be piped
into 'git fast-import'.

You can use it as a human-readable bundle replacement (see
linkgit:git-bundle[1]), or as a kind of an interactive
'git filter-branch'.


OPTIONS
-------
--progress=<n>::
	Insert 'progress' statements every <n> objects, to be shown by
	'git fast-import' during import.

--signed-tags=(verbatim|warn|warn-strip|strip|abort)::
	Specify how to handle signed tags.  Since any transformation
	after the export can change the tag names (which can also happen
	when excluding revisions) the signatures will not match.
+
When asking to 'abort' (which is the default), this program will die
when encountering a signed tag.  With 'strip', the tags will silently
be made unsigned, with 'warn-strip' they will be made unsigned but a
warning will be displayed, with 'verbatim', they will be silently
exported and with 'warn', they will be exported, but you will see a
warning.

--tag-of-filtered-object=(abort|drop|rewrite)::
	Specify how to handle tags whose tagged object is filtered out.
	Since revisions and files to export can be limited by path,
	tagged objects may be filtered completely.
+
When asking to 'abort' (which is the default), this program will die
when encountering such a tag.  With 'drop' it will omit such tags from
the output.  With 'rewrite', if the tagged object is a commit, it will
rewrite the tag to tag an ancestor commit (via parent rewriting; see
linkgit:git-rev-list[1])

-M::
-C::
	Perform move and/or copy detection, as described in the
	linkgit:git-diff[1] manual page, and use it to generate
	rename and copy commands in the output dump.
+
Note that earlier versions of this command did not complain and
produced incorrect results if you gave these options.

--export-marks=<file>::
	Dumps the internal marks table to <file> when complete.
	Marks are written one per line as `:markid SHA-1`. Only marks
	for revisions are dumped; marks for blobs are ignored.
	Backends can use this file to validate imports after they
	have been completed, or to save the marks table across
	incremental runs.  As <file> is only opened and truncated
	at completion, the same path can also be safely given to
	\--import-marks.
	The file will not be written if no new object has been
	marked/exported.

--import-marks=<file>::
	Before processing any input, load the marks specified in
	<file>.  The input file must exist, must be readable, and
	must use the same format as produced by \--export-marks.
+
Any commits that have already been marked will not be exported again.
If the backend uses a similar \--import-marks file, this allows for
incremental bidirectional exporting of the repository by keeping the
marks the same across runs.

--fake-missing-tagger::
	Some old repositories have tags without a tagger.  The
	fast-import protocol was pretty strict about that, and did not
	allow that.  So fake a tagger to be able to fast-import the
	output.

--use-done-feature::
	Start the stream with a 'feature done' stanza, and terminate
	it with a 'done' command.

--no-data::
	Skip output of blob objects and instead refer to blobs via
	their original SHA-1 hash.  This is useful when rewriting the
	directory structure or history of a repository without
	touching the contents of individual files.  Note that the
	resulting stream can only be used by a repository which
	already contains the necessary objects.

--full-tree::
	This option will cause fast-export to issue a "deleteall"
	directive for each commit followed by a full list of all files
	in the commit (as opposed to just listing the files which are
	different from the commit's first parent).

[<git-rev-list-args>...]::
	A list of arguments, acceptable to 'git rev-parse' and
	'git rev-list', that specifies the specific objects and references
	to export.  For example, `master~10..master` causes the
	current master reference to be exported along with all objects
	added since its 10th ancestor commit.

EXAMPLES
--------

-------------------------------------------------------------------
$ git fast-export --all | (cd /empty/repository && git fast-import)
-------------------------------------------------------------------

This will export the whole repository and import it into the existing
empty repository.  Except for reencoding commits that are not in
UTF-8, it would be a one-to-one mirror.

-----------------------------------------------------
$ git fast-export master~5..master |
	sed "s|refs/heads/master|refs/heads/other|" |
	git fast-import
-----------------------------------------------------

This makes a new branch called 'other' from 'master~5..master'
(i.e. if 'master' has linear history, it will take the last 5 commits).

Note that this assumes that none of the blobs and commit messages
referenced by that revision range contains the string
'refs/heads/master'.


Limitations
-----------

Since 'git fast-import' cannot tag trees, you will not be
able to export the linux.git repository completely, as it contains
a tag referencing a tree instead of a commit.

GIT
---
Part of the linkgit:git[1] suite