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Getting Started

Registering existing Git repos

To add a repository to the list of registered repos, run scalar register [<path>]. If <path> is not provided, then the "current repository" is discovered from the working directory by scanning the parent paths for a path containing a .git folder, possibly inside a src folder.

To see which repositories are currently tracked by the service, run scalar list.

Run scalar unregister [<path>] to remove the repo from this list.

Creating a new Scalar clone using the GVFS Protocol

The clone verb creates a local enlistment of a remote repository using the GVFS protocol.

scalar clone [options] <url> [<dir>]

Create a local copy of the repository at <url>. If specified, create the <dir> directory and place the repository there. Otherwise, the last section of the <url> will be used for <dir>.

At the end, the repo is located at <dir>/src. By default, the sparse-checkout feature is enabled and the only files present are those in the root of your Git repository. Use git sparse-checkout set to expand the set of directories you want to see, or git sparse-checkout disable to expand to all files. You can explore the subdirectories outside your sparse-checkout specification using git ls-tree HEAD.

Sparse Repo Mode

By default, Scalar reduces your working directory to the only the files at the root of the repository. You need to add the folders you care about to build up to your working set.

  • scalar clone <url>
    • Please choose the Clone with HTTPS option in the Clone Repository dialog in Azure Repos, not Clone with SSH.
  • cd <root>\src
  • At this point, your src directory only contains files that appear in your root tree. No folders are populated.
  • Set the directory list for your sparse-checkout using:
    1. git sparse-checkout set <dir1> <dir2> ...
    2. git sparse-checkout set --stdin <dir-list.txt
  • Run git commands as you normally would.
  • To fully populate your working directory, run git sparse-checkout disable.

If instead you want to start with all files on-disk, you can clone with the --full-clone option. To enable sparse-checkout after the fact, run git sparse-checkout init --cone. This will initialize your sparse-checkout patterns to only match the files at root.

If you are unfamiliar with what directories are available in the repository, then you can run git ls-tree -d --name-only HEAD to discover the directories at root, or git ls-tree -d --name-only HEAD <path> to discover the directories in <path>.

Options

These options allow a user to customize their initial enlistment.

  • --full-clone: If specified, do not initialize the sparse-checkout feature. All files will be present in your src directory. This behaves very similar to a Git partial clone in that blobs are downloaded on demand. However, it will use the GVFS protocol to download all Git objects.

  • --cache-server-url=<url>: If specified, set the intended cache server to the specified <url>. All object queries will use the GVFS protocol to this <url> instead of the origin remote. If the remote supplies a list of cache servers via the <url>/gvfs/config endpoint, then the clone command will select a nearby cache server from that list.

  • --branch=<ref>: Specify the branch to checkout after clone.

  • --local-cache-path=<path>: Use this option to override the path for the local Scalar cache. If not specified, then Scalar will select a default path to share objects with your other enlistments. On Windows, this path is a subdirectory of <Volume>:\.scalarCache\. On Mac, this path is a subdirectory of ~/.scalarCache/. The default cache path is recommended so multiple enlistments of the same remote repository share objects on the same device.

Advanced Options

The options below are not intended for use by a typical user. These are usually used by build machines to create a temporary enlistment that operates on a single commit.

  • --single-branch: Use this option to only download metadata for the branch that will be checked out. This is helpful for build machines that target a remote with many branches. Any git fetch commands after the clone will still ask for all branches.

  • --no-prefetch: Use this option to not prefetch commits after clone. This is not recommended for anyone planning to use their clone for history traversal. Use of this option will make commands like git log or git pull extremely slow and is therefore not recommended.

Removing a Scalar Clone

Since the scalar clone command sets up a file-system watcher (when available), that watcher could prevent deleting the enlistment. Run scalar delete <path> from outside of your enlistment to unregister the enlistment from the filesystem watcher and delete the enlistment at <path>.