Repo is a tool from AOSP (Android) that allows you to manage a vast hierarchy of individual Git repositories. It’s basically a small Python tool that adds some abstraction around Git commands. The manifest that controls the project tree is written in XML, can include submanifests, can assign projects into different groups (so you do not have to clone all of them every time), can include additional command primitives to do file copies and tweak how the manifests are loaded, etc. The manifest is written against a basic specification but, still, it is a lot easier to find a way to avoid doing this yourself.

You can access the built-in manifest-parsing functionality directly from the Repo tool. We can also use the version of the tool that’s embedded directly in the Repo tree.

For example, to load a manifest:

/tree/.repo/repo$ python
>>> import manifest_xml
>>> xm = manifest_xml.XmlManifest('/tree/.repo')

Obviously, you’ll be [temporarily] manipulating the sys.path to load this from your integration.

To explore, you can play with the “projects” (list of project objects) and “paths” properties (a dictionary of paths to project objects).

Number of projects:

>>> print(len(xm.projects))
878

>>> print(len(xm.paths))
878

paths is a dictionary.

A project object looks like:

>>> p = xm.projects[0]
>>> p


>>> dir(p)
['AbandonBranch', 'AddAnnotation', 'AddCopyFile', 'AddLinkFile', 'CheckoutBranch', 'CleanPublishedCache', 'CurrentBranch', 'Derived', 'DownloadPatchSet', 'Exists', 'GetBranch', 'GetBranches', 'GetCommitRevisionId', 'GetDerivedSubprojects', 'GetRegisteredSubprojects', 'GetRemote', 'GetRevisionId', 'GetUploadableBranch', 'GetUploadableBranches', 'HasChanges', 'IsDirty', 'IsRebaseInProgress', 'MatchesGroups', 'PostRepoUpgrade', 'PrintWorkTreeDiff', 'PrintWorkTreeStatus', 'PruneHeads', 'StartBranch', 'Sync_LocalHalf', 'Sync_NetworkHalf', 'UncommitedFiles', 'UploadForReview', 'UserEmail', 'UserName', 'WasPublished', '_ApplyCloneBundle', '_CheckDirReference', '_CheckForSha1', '_Checkout', '_CherryPick', '_CopyAndLinkFiles', '_ExtractArchive', '_FastForward', '_FetchArchive', '_FetchBundle', '_GetSubmodules', '_GitGetByExec', '_InitAnyMRef', '_InitGitDir', '_InitHooks', '_InitMRef', '_InitMirrorHead', '_InitRemote', '_InitWorkTree', '_IsValidBundle', '_LoadUserIdentity', '_Rebase', '_ReferenceGitDir', '_RemoteFetch', '_ResetHard', '_Revert', '_UpdateHooks', '__class__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__doc__', '__format__', '__getattribute__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__module__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__', '__weakref__', '_allrefs', '_getLogs', '_gitdir_path', '_revlist', '_userident_email', '_userident_name', 'annotations', 'bare_git', 'bare_objdir', 'bare_ref', 'clone_depth', 'config', 'copyfiles', 'dest_branch', 'enabled_repo_hooks', 'getAddedAndRemovedLogs', 'gitdir', 'groups', 'is_derived', 'linkfiles', 'manifest', 'name', 'objdir', 'old_revision', 'optimized_fetch', 'parent', 'rebase', 'relpath', 'remote', 'revisionExpr', 'revisionId', 'shareable_dirs', 'shareable_files', 'snapshots', 'subprojects', 'sync_c', 'sync_s', 'upstream', 'work_git', 'working_tree_dirs', 'working_tree_files', 'worktree']

The relative path for the project:

>>> path = p.relpath
>>> xm.paths[path]

The revision for the project:

>>> p.revisionExpr
u'master'

The remote for the project:

>>> p.GetRemote('origin').url
u'ssh://gerrit.company.com:2537/android/platform/external/lzma'

You can also get a config object representing the Git config for the bare archive of the project:

>>> p.config


>>> dir(p.config)
['ForRepository', 'ForUser', 'GetBoolean', 'GetBranch', 'GetRemote', 'GetString', 'GetSubSections', 'Global', 'Has', 'HasSection', 'SetString', 'UrlInsteadOf', '_ForUser', '_Global', '_Read', '_ReadGit', '_ReadJson', '_SaveJson', '__class__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__doc__', '__format__', '__getattribute__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__module__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__', '__weakref__', '_branches', '_cache', '_cache_dict', '_do', '_json', '_remotes', '_section_dict', '_sections', 'defaults', 'file']

>>> p.config.file
u'/tree/.repo/projects/external/lzma.git/config'

An example of how to efficiently establish a tree of projects to paths:

_MAPPING_CACHE = {}

def get_repo_project_to_path_mapping(path):
    try:
        return _MAPPING_CACHE[path]
    except KeyError:
        pass

    repo_meta_path = os.path.join(path, '.repo')
    repo_tool_path = os.path.join(repo_meta_path, 'repo')

    if repo_tool_path not in sys.path:
        sys.path.insert(0, repo_tool_path)

    import manifest_xml

    xm = manifest_xml.XmlManifest(repo_meta_path)
    project_to_path_mapping = {}
    for path, p in xm.paths.items():
        project_to_path_mapping[str(p.name)] = str(path)

    _MAPPING_CACHE[path] = project_to_path_mapping
    return project_to_path_mapping