acroz

Blog of Andrew Crozier, a software engineer based in London.

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Navigating a sea of repos

04 Jul 2020

From both work and personal projects, I have lots (at the time of writing, 182) repositories cloned on my laptop. Most of these are repositories that I contribute to, though some are other code bases that I’ve cloned to be able to search more effectively with command line tools.

To help organise them in a sane way, I keep them in a directory structure that mirrors their URLs when cloned from GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab. For example, they look like:

This works well, and helps to find repositories that I know are stored in a particular Bitbucket organisation, for example, but works less well when I’m less sure of that repo’s location. Even when I do know the location, there’s still often a lot of bashing the tab key to complete nested directories.

To save time with this, I’ve set up a function in my shell that fuzzily matches the git repositories. This glues together 3 parts:

  1. Generate a list of all repos with find or similar
  2. Fuzzily match on this list of repos with fzy
  3. Change directory to the selected repo

Old solution with find

Prior to using GitLab repositories, I used the fact that all repositories were exactly two levels below ~/src to generate the list of repositories:

find ~/src -type d -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 2

However, since GitLab can have nested organisations, the depth of the repository root relative to ~/src can no longer be guaranteed. I was able to generate a find command that would identify git repositories using the fact that they contain a .git directory, but it was really slow because it’s searching the contents of all the repositories when it doesn’t need to:

find ~/src -type d -name .git | sed 's/\/\.git$//g'

On my my current source directory, this takes 27 seconds to run!

New solution: git-find-repos

To more efficiently search my local directories, I wrote a simple CLI tool that does a recursive search of a directory, printing out git repositories. As it’s able to stop traversing down a directory tree as soon as it encounters a .git directory, it’s much faster (0.26 seconds instead of 27).

You can check out git-find-repos for yourself on GitHub. Installation is easy with pip or pipx:

pipx install git-find-repos

By default, git-find-repos searches the current directory recursively. Alternatively, you can specifiy a particular path:

git-find-repos ~/src

You can also use git-find-repos as if it were a subcommand of git (thanks to my colleague Víctor Zabalza for this suggestion):

git find-repos ~/src

Putting it all together

With git-find-repos, I’m able to put together my convenience shell function as desired. In my .zshrc, I define the following function:

function repo {
    initial_query=$1
    dest=$(git find-repos ~/src | fzy -q "$initial_query" -l 20) && cd "$HOME/src/$dest"
}

Now, all I need to do to navigate to a repo is run repo in the shell, type enough of the name for it to match with fzy, then hit enter. If a match is found, the repo function will change my directory there.

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