Git keyword substitution like those in Subversion?

Question

I used to work under Subversion/SVN and was instantly using nice feature called keyword substitution. Just putting in source files smth like:

/*
 *   $Author: ivanovpv $
 *   $Rev: 42 $
 *   $LastChangedDate: 2012-05-25 21:47:42 +0200 (Fri, 25 May 2012) $
 */

And each time Subversion was substituting keywords (Author, Rev, LastChangedDate) with actual ones.

Some time ago I was forced to move to Git and just wondering is there's something similar to Subversion's keyword substitution in Git?

Answer 1

Solution

Well, you could easily implement such a feature yourself.

Basically I embedded the commit command into a shell script. This script will first substitute the desired macros and then commit the changes. The project consists of two files:

Content?

keysub, a bash shell script and keysub.awk an awk script to replace keywords in a specific file. A third file is a config file which contains the values that should be substituted (besides variable stuff like commit count and timestamp).

How do you use it?

You call keysub instead of commit with the same options. The -m or -a option should come before any other commit option. A new option (that should always come first) is -f which takes a config file as a value. Example:

$ git add 'someJavaFile.java'
$ keysub -m 'fixed concurrent thread issue'
$ git push

or

$ git -f .myfile.cnf -m 'enhanced javadoc entries'

keysub

#!/bin/bash

# 0 -- functions/methods
#########################
# <Function description>
function get_timestamp () {
  date    # change this to get a custom timestamp
}

# 1 -- Variable declarations
#############################
# input file for mapping
file=".keysub.cnf"
timestamp=$(get_timestamp)


# 2 -- Argument parsing and flag checks
########################################

# Parsing flag-list
while getopts ":f:m:a" opt;
do
  case $opt in
    f) file=${OPTARG}
       ;;
    a) echo 'Warning, keyword substitution will be incomplete when invoked'
       echo 'with the -a flag. The commit message will not be substituted into'
       echo 'source files. Use -m "message" for full substitutions.'
       echo -e 'Would you like to continue [y/n]? \c'
       read answer
       [[ ${answer} =~ [Yy] ]] || exit 3
       unset answer
       type="commit_a"
       break
       ;;
    m) type="commit_m"
       commitmsg=${OPTARG}
       break
       ;;
   \?) break
       ;;
  esac
done
shift $(($OPTIND - 1))

# check file for typing
if [[ ! -f ${file} ]]
then
  echo 'No valid config file found.'
  exit 1
fi

# check if commit type was supplied
if [[ -z ${type} ]]
then
  echo 'No commit parameters/flags supplied...'
  exit 2
fi

# 3 -- write config file
#########################
sed "
  /timestamp:/ {
    s/\(timestamp:\).*/\1${timestamp}/
  }
  /commitmsg:/ {
    s/\(commitmsg:\).*/\1${commitmsg:-default commit message}/
  }
" ${file} > tmp

mv tmp ${file}

# 4 -- get remaining tags
##########################
author=$(grep 'author' ${file} | cut -f1 -d':' --complement)


# 5 -- get files ready to commit
#################################
git status -s | grep '^[MARCU]' | cut -c1-3 --complement > tmplist

# 6 -- invoke awk and perform substitution
###########################################
# beware to change path to your location of the awk script
for item in $(cat tmplist)
do
  echo ${item}
  awk -v "commitmsg=${commitmsg}" -v "author=${author}" \
      -v "timestamp=${timestamp}" -f "${HOME}/lib/awk/keysub.awk" ${item} \
      > tmpfile
  mv tmpfile ${item}
done
rm tmplist

# 5 -- invoke git commit
#########################
case ${type} in
  "commit_m") git commit -m "${commitmsg}" "$@"
              ;;
  "commit_a") git commit -a "$@"
              ;;
esac

# exit using success code
exit 0

keysub.awk

# 0 BEGIN
##########
BEGIN {
  FS=":"
  OFS=": "
}

# 1 parse source files 
########################
# update author
$0 ~ /.*\$Author.*\$.*/ {
  $2=author " $"
}

# update timestamp
$0 ~ /.*\$LastChangedDate.*\$.*/ {
  $0=$1
  $2=timestamp " $"
}

# update commit message
$0 ~ /.*\$LastChangeMessage.*\$.*/ {
  $2=commitmsg " $"
}

# update commit counts
$0 ~ /.*\$Rev.*\$.*/ {
  ++$2
  $2=$2 " $"
}

# print line
{
  print
}

Config file

author:ubunut-420
timestamp:Fri Jun 21 20:42:54 CEST 2013
commitmsg:default commit message

Remarks

I've tried to document well enough so you can easily implement it and modify it to your own, personal needs. Note that you can give the macros any name you want to, as long as you modify it in the source code. I also aimed to keep it relatively easy to extend the script, you should be able to add new macros fairly easily. If you're interested in extending or modifying the script, you might want to take a look at the .git directory too, there should be plenty of info there that can help to enhance the script, due to lack of time I didn't investigate the folder though.