git-deps requires pygit2, which in return requires libgit2. git-deps and pygit2 are both Python modules, but libgit2 is not. This means that there are a few ways to approach installation, detailed below. Corrections and additions to these instructions are very welcome!

Before you pick an option, it is very important to consider that only certain combinations of libgit2 and pygit2 will work together.

Also, Python < 3.7 is no longer supported for git-deps (since pygit2 requires 3.7 or higher).

As mentioned in pygit2's installation instructions, pip 19.0 and later can install binary wheels of pygit2 which include libgit2. This makes installation considerably easier, and should be as simple as:

sudo pip3 install git-deps

or just for the current user:

pip3 install --user git-deps

For a per-user install, you will probably have to also ensure that you have ~/.local/bin on your path. See the pip documentation if you are unsure how this works.

Also note that it may be pip rather than pip3 on your system, but if so run pip --version to make sure that you aren't getting a Python 2.x environment by mistake.

if you are using Linux, there is a good chance that your distribution already offers packages for both pygit2 and libgit2, in which case installing pygit2 from packages should also automatically install libgit2. For example, on openSUSE, just do something like:

sudo zypper install python38-pygit2

Note that this assumes Python 3.8, which is the latest at the time of writing.

Similarly, on Debian:

sudo apt-get install python3-pygit2

pygit2's website also has installation instructions for Windows and Mac OS.

Finally, install git-deps via pip, for example system-wide on Linux via:

sudo pip3 install git-deps

or just for the current user:

pip3 install --user git-deps

(See the caveats in option 0 above about pip vs. pip3 and per-user installs.)

In this case it may be enough to install libgit2 via your distribution's packaging tool, e.g. on openSUSE:

sudo zypper install libgit2-24

Then install git-deps via pip as described in option 1 above. This should also automatically install pygit2 as one of its dependencies. However be aware that this will pick a pygit2 version based on requirements.txt from git-deps, which may not be compatible with the libgit2 you have installed from OS packages. This can be fixed by telling pip install which version of pygit2 you want. For example if you have installed libgit2 0.24.0, you could do:

pip install pygit2==0.24 git-deps

First follow the installation instructions for pygit2.

Then clone this repository and follow the standard Python module installation route, e.g.

python setup.py install

or if you want to hack on git-deps:

pip install -e .

Rather than following the above manual steps, you can try an alternative approach created by Paul Wellner Bou which facilitates running git-deps in a Docker container. This has been tested on Ubuntu 14.10, where it was used as a way to circumvent difficulties with installing libgit2 >= 0.22.

Now git-deps should be on your $PATH, which means that executing it and also git deps (with a space, not a hyphen) should both work.

The web-based graph visualization code uses Javascript and relies on many third-party modules. If you've installed git-deps via pip then these files should all be magically installed without any extra effort, so you can skip reading the rest of this section.

If however you are installing git-deps from source and you want to use the shiny new graph visualization web server functionality, you will need to fetch these Javascript libraries yourself. Currently only one approach to installation is listed below, but any Javascript experts who have suggestions about other ways to install are warmly encouraged to submit them.

• To install the required Javascript libraries, you will need npm installed, and then type:

  cd git_deps/html
  npm install
  node_modules/.bin/browserify -t coffeeify -d js/git-deps-graph.coffee -o js/bundle.js
  

  (If you are developing git-deps then replace browserify with watchify -v in order to continually regenerate bundle.js whenever any of the input files change.)

• Optionally install browserify globally so that it's on your $PATH and therefore executable directly rather than having to specify the node_modules/.bin prefix. For example (at least on Linux) you can use the -g option of npm by running this as root:

   npm install -g browserify
  

• You will need the Flask Python module installed, but that should have already been taken care of by the base installation described above (e.g. via pip).

Now you should be able to run git deps --serve and point your browser at the URL it outputs.

It is possible to set a gitfile:// URL handler so that if you double-click any commit node on the dependency graph, your browser will launch that handler with a URL which points to that commit within the repository path on your local filesystem. So if you configure your browser desktop environment, you can have a program such as gitk launch for viewing further details of that commit. Obviously this only makes sense when viewing the graph via http://localhost.

On most Linux machines, this can be set up by first locating the Desktop Entry file which is provided in the distribution for convenient installation:

pip show -f git-deps | grep gitfile-handler.desktop

Once you have located it, it needs to be copied or symlinked into the right location, e.g.

ln -sf /usr/share/git_deps/gitfile-handler.desktop \
    ~/.local/share/applications

and then the desktop file has to be registered as a handler for the gitfile protocol:

xdg-mime default gitfile-handler.desktop x-scheme-handler/gitfile