Git mirrors for WordPress

I’m pleased to share we now have an official Git mirror for the WordPress core development SVN repository.

git clone git://develop.git.wordpress.org/

Read-only mirrors are also set up for a few other WordPress.org repositories, including BuddyPress, bbPress, and the old core.svn “build” repository:

git clone git://buddypress.git.wordpress.org/
git clone git://bbpress.git.wordpress.org/
git clone git://core.git.wordpress.org/
git clone git://glotpress.git.wordpress.org/

Make sure you use the git protocol (not http) and include the trailing slash.

Can you use develop.git.wordpress.org for core development? Yes! For all practical purposes, the SVN and Git repositories are now equals. Pick your poison; use whatever you’d like for all your development and deployment needs.

For creating patches: If you’re into the command line, simply use git diff — to be specific, git diff --no-prefix is ideal. This format is easily applied with patch, just like SVN diffs. For more, check out scribu’s post on contributing using git. Might also be a good time to plug grunt-patch-wordpress, a work in progress — help make it awesome, if you can.

With this mirror, we’ve applied some lessons we learned from previous experiences:

  • Tags for major releases receive an extra .0 (“3.8.0”, not “3.8”), making them compatible with tools requiring semver-like version numbers, and allowing branches to have their own namespace (“3.8”, not “3.8-branch”).
  • Committer data is pulled from WordPress.org.
  • The SSL versions of the SVN repositories are used.

Note that these Git repositories have different hashes than anything currently mirrored on GitHub. We never did break these hashes as promised a year ago. Next steps will be to figure out how to best mirror these to GitHub (and replace what’s there), which is complicated by now having old and new repositories for core development. Additionally, I’m sure we’ll find at least one glitch in this in a matter of a few days, so consider the next week or so a beta test.

Edit: Well, I mentioned the next week would be a beta test. We found an error (that didn’t take long) in how authors got synced over, so we’ll be breaking the hashes tonight.

There are a lot of other repositories on WordPress.org not yet mirrored. Notably: plugins and themes. These are massive multi-project repositories and will require a bit more investment.