sourcegraph/cmd/gitserver
Keegan Carruthers-Smith f7d62a3076
gitserver: RawDiff checks if commits exist (#64245)
ResolveRevision additionally adds a "^0" to the spec to make sure we
actually check if it exists. This is important, since most uses of the
ChangedFiles API pass in commit shas which do not get resolved by git
unless the "^0" is present.

I noticed this since hybrid search in searcher started to fail if the
commit was missing. In particular Zoekt for empty repositories uses a
fake SHA of 404aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa so when a repo
started getting cloned hybrid search would fail until it was indexed.
Hybrid search explicitly checks for the NotFound error, so hybrid search
failing was a a regression from moving away from the SymbolDiff API.
2024-08-02 13:10:04 +00:00
..
internal gitserver: RawDiff checks if commits exist (#64245) 2024-08-02 13:10:04 +00:00
shared authz: Drop requirement for installing authz providers in every service (#63743) 2024-07-31 01:23:34 +02:00
BUILD.bazel bazel: transcribe test ownership to bazel tags (#62664) 2024-05-16 15:51:16 +01:00
image_test.yaml gitserver: Simplify invocation of p4-fusion (#62070) 2024-05-02 01:44:53 +02:00
main.go remove more remannts of OSS build (#58253) 2023-11-10 07:59:03 +00:00
README.md Update the legacy link to sg doc (#64017) 2024-08-01 16:18:30 -07:00

gitserver

Mirrors repositories from their code host. All other Sourcegraph services talk to gitserver when they need data from git. Requests for fetch operations, however, go through repo-updater.

gitserver exposes an "exec" API over HTTP for running git commands against clones of repositories. gitserver also exposes APIs for the management of clones.

The management of clones comprises most of the complexity in gitserver since:

  • We want to avoid concurrent clones and fetches of the same repository.
  • We want to limit the number of concurrent clones and fetches.
  • When adding/removing/modifying a clone, concurrent attempts to run commands needs to be gracefully dealt with.
  • We need to be robust against the many ways git clones can degrade. (gc, interrupted clones)

Additionally we have invested heavily in the observability of gitserver. Nearly every operation Sourcegraph does runs one or more git commands. So we have detailed observability in prometheus, net/event, jaeger, honeycomb and stderr logs.

We normalize repository names when storing them on disk. Always use protocol.NormalizeRepo. The $GIT_DIR of a repository is at reposRoot/normalized_name/.git.

When doing an operation on a file or directory which may be concurrently read/written please use atomic filesystem patterns. This usually involves heavy use of os.Rename. Search for existing uses of os.Rename to see examples.

Scaling

gitserver's memory usage consists of short lived git subprocesses.

This is an IO and compute heavy service since most Sourcegraph requests will trigger 1 or more git commands. As such we shard requests for a repo to a specific replica. This allows us to horizontally scale out the service.

The service is stateful (maintaining git clones). However, it only contains data mirrored from upstream code hosts.

Perforce depots

Syncing of Perforce depots is accomplished by either p4-fusion or git p4 (deprecated), both of which clone Perforce depots into Git repositories in gitserver.

p4-fusion in development

To use p4-fusion while developing Sourcegraph, there are a couple of options.

Docker

Run gitserver in a Docker container. This is the option that gives an experience closest to a deployed Sourcegraph instance, and will work for any platform/OS on which you're developing (running sg start).

Bazel

Native binaries are provided through Bazel, built via Nix in our fork of p4-fusion. It can be invoked either through ./dev/p4-fusion-dev or directly with bazel run //dev/tools:p4-fusion.