Coding Challenge #26 - Build Your Own Git Client

This weeks challenge is to build your own git client.

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OK on with the Coding Challange!

As a software engineer, coder, programmer, or whatever you refer to yourself as, I’m sure you’ve heard of the distributed version control system that is git and the hugely popular git hosting service GitHub.

If you’ve not come across git before, I wrote about it recently on LinkedIn here , where I also explained why it’s called git!

This challenge is going to have you build a git client that can: create a new repository, add some commits and push them to GitHub.

Step Zero

This is software engineering so we’re zero-indexed and for this step you’re going to set your environment up ready to begin developing and testing your solution.

I’ll leave you to setup your IDE / editor of choice and programming language of choice.

Once you’ve done that I suggest taking some time to read through the Internals section of the Git SCM website. It’ll take you through the steps needed to manipulate a git repository. If you want to really dig into git you can check out the git source code on GitHub.

Step 1

In this step your goal is to create a basic git client that can initialise an empty git repository. An empty git repo is simply the .git directory with a few files in it, these are:

• HEAD a reference to the current HEAD.
• config - the repository’s configuration file, there are some defaults set in it.
• description - the repository’s description file - the default value is defined in the git source repo .
• hooks - a directory containing any hooks for the repo.
• info - a directory that contains the excludes file. We’ll ignore it for this challenge.
• objects - a directory, this is the object store.
• refs - a directory.

You can check you implementation by running it and then testing with git itself. For example (I’ve called our git implementation ccgit):

% ccgit init test
initialized empty repository: test
% cd test
% git status
On branch master No commits yet nothing to commit (create/copy files and use "git add" to track)
        

Don’t forget to check if there is already a git repository initialised in the directory.

Continued...

You can find Step 2 and beyond on the?Coding Challenges ?website as?Write Your Own Git

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