Github action to checkout repository

[somehowchris]

First, let me start with, damn that project is awesome 😄

I've dug through it the last few hours as its really interesting but I find it a bit hard to get a grip where to start, as it seems to me its really different then using something like git2-rs (don't get me wrong, I dont like git2-rs but its somewhat close to what I use with git in a cli)

Before using it in something like cargo-binstall I would like to have a go with something else to learn and see how it works.

I had a search for something like a github action using gitoxide to replace actions/checkout but couldn't find one. It seems to me like this would ge a nice case to get the word out about gitoxide and aswell interms of efficenty (human time and hard ressources of ci).

May I ask, is it too early for something like this? If not, may I ask for some guidance on starting points for the usage of gitoxide or its subsequent crates as libraries?

Really appriciate the effort and any guidance 🦄

[Byron]

Thanks a lot for your interest! Indeed it's a bit tough to find your bearings within the 20+ crates or so, but git-repository is the top-level for application developers akin to git2. I'd build the docs (cargo doc --open --package git-repository) and go from open(…) or discover(…).

Using gitoxide to accelerate checkouts on CI is an excellent idea, and I have added it to the tracking issue that you could subscribe to to stay informed about the checkout progress.

At the current time, it's indeed a little early to use gitoxide for cloning and checkouts, but it's a good time if you want to read data from a git repository.

[somehowchris]

Really appriciate the guidance 💯

Using gitoxide for a checkout action was just an idea from me to get some experience using it 😓

I think a lot of crates such as crates-index (frewsxcv/rust-crates-index#82) could also benefit as the crates git index is growing fast

[somehowchris]

BTW if gitoxide could be built as a static binary, the github action could just download a docker image built from scratch which means it's really just loading some mb and not a whole runtime

[Byron]

I think a lot of crates such as crates-index (frewsxcv/rust-crates-index#82) could also benefit as the crates git index is growing fast.

Indeed, it's already on the list of crates that will be 'oxidized' one day.

BTW if gitoxide could be built as a static binary [...]

That should be a decent fallback in case there is no binary support for a certain CI platform, even though it should be possible to build gitoxide for all platforms currently supported by GitHub.

[somehowchris]

Nice 👍🏻

This "BTW" was more meant like, if speed matters, and the setup should be fairly easy without needing rust before the checkout scratch docker images could be a minimalistic thing

[Byron]

This "BTW" was more meant like, if speed matters, and the setup should be fairly easy without needing rust before the checkout

Agreed! Building gitoxide before checking anything out would certainly negate any benefit. The idea is to download pre-built binaries instead. If there is no such binary for the platform at hand but docker is available, one could leverage this by running a docker image instead.

[somehowchris]

Github actions can be built as docker container actions, https://docs.github.com/en/actions/creating-actions/creating-a-docker-container-action so the version of a docker image could resemble the version of the action aka the version of the code behind the docker image

[Byron]

Thanks for the heads-up! I wasn't aware docker-actions have their own section in the manual and made sure I won't forget about that in the tracking issue. This should help to get something going quickly.