Libgit2sharp Get remote branches

Question

Maybe asked before, but I cannot find the clear answer. When I need to list the branches of a repo with gitlib2sharp, do I really first need to clone to a local repo? What is the sense in that? I just want to clone a specific branch, like you do with git clone https://bla/repo.git -b branch1

Now I first need to do a local checkout, then get the branches and from there do a second round.

Am I missing something here (hope I do).

TIA for your answer!

Grtz, Ronald

Update (to long for comment): OK, so here's the use case. A company delivers ssrs reports, which we need to deploy through TAP. So my thoughts were to do this via Git. For each change let them create a branche, upload/alter/etc in this branche. And iterate changes in this branch till all is fine. In the iterations they should be able to (re)deploy themselves on at least T. At the final stage we merge the brnanch to master and (re)deploy master in P. In Github you can completely 'click' this flow, but of course I want to automate this and have preferably someelse push the buttons, so they don't need me for this. So what's the best programmatic choice here? When they make a branch and start deploying in T, should I create (clone) the repo, point my local repo to the specific branch, get the files (.sql and .rdl files) and execute/upload these? I was not aware that when you clone a repo, you clone all the branches with it. Thanks so far already!

Answer 1

If you want to do something like git clone https://bla/repo.git -b branch1 with libgtk2sharp try this one:

var exampleRepositoryUrl = "https://github.com/npgsql/npgsql.git";
var exampleDestinationFolder = "branch-hotfix-3.0.8";
var exampleBranchName = "hotfix/3.0.8";

var repositoryClonedPath = Repository.Clone(exampleRepositoryUrl, 
                                            exampleDestinationFolder,
                                            new CloneOptions()
{
    BranchName = exampleBranchName 
});

using (var clonedRepo = new Repository(repositoryClonedPath))
{
    // ...
}

To list names of remote branches without cloning a repo you can use something like this:

var branches = Repository.ListRemoteReferences(exampleRepositoryUrl)
                         .Where(elem => elem.IsLocalBranch)
                         .Select(elem => elem.CanonicalName
                                             .Replace("refs/heads/", ""));