Is there a way of reading the files of a bare repo? For instance, I want to analyze each file and extract some features from a repository but without checking out the entire repo locally.
P.S: ideally, want to use C# for this
Thanks
It's not entirely clear what you want to do, but there are two main methods to extract data directly from a bare repository:
Use git cat-file -p to extract object data.
This method is simple and easy but has one non-obvious drawback: no .gitattributes style filtering occurs. (The obvious drawback is that you must name objects without being able to just look them up in the file system using OS routines. However, git cat-file does use all the usual git rev-parse rules, so you can simply git cat-file -p branch:path/to/file if you know the name of the branch and the file's path.)
Supply a work tree.
For instance, git --work-tree=/some/where checkout branch works even with a bare repository: the --work-tree provides the top level of the work tree. The one (or two depending on how you count) non-obvious drawback(s) here is/are that checking out a specific commit modifies the bare repository's index and HEAD (current branch / commit). The index itself may or may not be in use in any other way; if not, this is not an issue, and if so, you may want to use an alternate index (via environment variable GIT_INDEX_FILE). The HEAD is used implicitly by new git clone operations (if this particular bare clone is used as a source for other clones).