man > git-fast-export(1)

GIT-FAST-EXPORT(1)                           Git Manual                           GIT-FAST-EXPORT(1)

NAME
       git-fast-export - Git data exporter

SYNOPSIS
       git fast-export [<options>] | git fast-import


DESCRIPTION
       This program dumps the given revisions in a form suitable to be piped into git fast-import.

       You can use it as a human-readable bundle replacement (see git-bundle(1)), or as a format
       that can be edited before being fed to git fast-import in order to do history rewrites (an
       ability relied on by tools like git filter-repo).

OPTIONS
       --progress=<n>
           Insert progress statements every <n> objects, to be shown by git fast-import during
           import.

       --signed-tags=(verbatim|warn|warn-strip|strip|abort)
           Specify how to handle signed tags. Since any transformation after the export can change
           the tag names (which can also happen when excluding revisions) the signatures will not
           match.

           When asking to abort (which is the default), this program will die when encountering a
           signed tag. With strip, the tags will silently be made unsigned, with warn-strip they
           will be made unsigned but a warning will be displayed, with verbatim, they will be
           silently exported and with warn, they will be exported, but you will see a warning.

       --tag-of-filtered-object=(abort|drop|rewrite)
           Specify how to handle tags whose tagged object is filtered out. Since revisions and files
           to export can be limited by path, tagged objects may be filtered completely.

           When asking to abort (which is the default), this program will die when encountering such
           a tag. With drop it will omit such tags from the output. With rewrite, if the tagged
           object is a commit, it will rewrite the tag to tag an ancestor commit (via parent
           rewriting; see git-rev-list(1))

       -M, -C
           Perform move and/or copy detection, as described in the git-diff(1) manual page, and use
           it to generate rename and copy commands in the output dump.

           Note that earlier versions of this command did not complain and produced incorrect
           results if you gave these options.

       --export-marks=<file>
           Dumps the internal marks table to <file> when complete. Marks are written one per line as
           :markid SHA-1. Only marks for revisions are dumped; marks for blobs are ignored. Backends
           can use this file to validate imports after they have been completed, or to save the
           marks table across incremental runs. As <file> is only opened and truncated at
           completion, the same path can also be safely given to --import-marks. The file will not
           be written if no new object has been marked/exported.

       --import-marks=<file>
           Before processing any input, load the marks specified in <file>. The input file must
           exist, must be readable, and must use the same format as produced by --export-marks.

       --mark-tags
           In addition to labelling blobs and commits with mark ids, also label tags. This is useful
           in conjunction with --export-marks and --import-marks, and is also useful (and necessary)
           for exporting of nested tags. It does not hurt other cases and would be the default, but
           many fast-import frontends are not prepared to accept tags with mark identifiers.

           Any commits (or tags) that have already been marked will not be exported again. If the
           backend uses a similar --import-marks file, this allows for incremental bidirectional
           exporting of the repository by keeping the marks the same across runs.

       --fake-missing-tagger
           Some old repositories have tags without a tagger. The fast-import protocol was pretty
           strict about that, and did not allow that. So fake a tagger to be able to fast-import the
           output.

       --use-done-feature
           Start the stream with a feature done stanza, and terminate it with a done command.

       --no-data
           Skip output of blob objects and instead refer to blobs via their original SHA-1 hash.
           This is useful when rewriting the directory structure or history of a repository without
           touching the contents of individual files. Note that the resulting stream can only be
           used by a repository which already contains the necessary objects.

       --full-tree
           This option will cause fast-export to issue a "deleteall" directive for each commit
           followed by a full list of all files in the commit (as opposed to just listing the files
           which are different from the commit’s first parent).

       --anonymize
           Anonymize the contents of the repository while still retaining the shape of the history
           and stored tree. See the section on ANONYMIZING below.

       --anonymize-map=<from>[:<to>]
           Convert token <from> to <to> in the anonymized output. If <to> is omitted, map <from> to
           itself (i.e., do not anonymize it). See the section on ANONYMIZING below.

       --reference-excluded-parents
           By default, running a command such as git fast-export master~5..master will not include
           the commit master~5 and will make master~4 no longer have master~5 as a parent (though
           both the old master~4 and new master~4 will have all the same files). Use
           --reference-excluded-parents to instead have the stream refer to commits in the excluded
           range of history by their sha1sum. Note that the resulting stream can only be used by a
           repository which already contains the necessary parent commits.

       --show-original-ids
           Add an extra directive to the output for commits and blobs, original-oid <SHA1SUM>. While
           such directives will likely be ignored by importers such as git-fast-import, it may be
           useful for intermediary filters (e.g. for rewriting commit messages which refer to older
           commits, or for stripping blobs by id).

       --reencode=(yes|no|abort)
           Specify how to handle encoding header in commit objects. When asking to abort (which is
           the default), this program will die when encountering such a commit object. With yes, the
           commit message will be re-encoded into UTF-8. With no, the original encoding will be
           preserved.

       --refspec
           Apply the specified refspec to each ref exported. Multiple of them can be specified.

       [<git-rev-list-args>...]
           A list of arguments, acceptable to git rev-parse and git rev-list, that specifies the
           specific objects and references to export. For example, master~10..master causes the
           current master reference to be exported along with all objects added since its 10th
           ancestor commit and (unless the --reference-excluded-parents option is specified) all
           files common to master~9 and master~10.

EXAMPLES
           $ git fast-export --all | (cd /empty/repository && git fast-import)


       This will export the whole repository and import it into the existing empty repository.
       Except for reencoding commits that are not in UTF-8, it would be a one-to-one mirror.

           $ git fast-export master~5..master |
                   sed "s|refs/heads/master|refs/heads/other|" |
                   git fast-import


       This makes a new branch called other from master~5..master (i.e. if master has linear
       history, it will take the last 5 commits).

       Note that this assumes that none of the blobs and commit messages referenced by that revision
       range contains the string refs/heads/master.

ANONYMIZING
       If the --anonymize option is given, git will attempt to remove all identifying information
       from the repository while still retaining enough of the original tree and history patterns to
       reproduce some bugs. The goal is that a git bug which is found on a private repository will
       persist in the anonymized repository, and the latter can be shared with git developers to
       help solve the bug.

       With this option, git will replace all refnames, paths, blob contents, commit and tag
       messages, names, and email addresses in the output with anonymized data. Two instances of the
       same string will be replaced equivalently (e.g., two commits with the same author will have
       the same anonymized author in the output, but bear no resemblance to the original author
       string). The relationship between commits, branches, and tags is retained, as well as the
       commit timestamps (but the commit messages and refnames bear no resemblance to the
       originals). The relative makeup of the tree is retained (e.g., if you have a root tree with
       10 files and 3 trees, so will the output), but their names and the contents of the files will
       be replaced.

       If you think you have found a git bug, you can start by exporting an anonymized stream of the
       whole repository:

           $ git fast-export --anonymize --all >anon-stream


       Then confirm that the bug persists in a repository created from that stream (many bugs will
       not, as they really do depend on the exact repository contents):

           $ git init anon-repo
           $ cd anon-repo
           $ git fast-import <../anon-stream
           $ ... test your bug ...


       If the anonymized repository shows the bug, it may be worth sharing anon-stream along with a
       regular bug report. Note that the anonymized stream compresses very well, so gzipping it is
       encouraged. If you want to examine the stream to see that it does not contain any private
       data, you can peruse it directly before sending. You may also want to try:

           $ perl -pe 's/\d+/X/g' <anon-stream | sort -u | less


       which shows all of the unique lines (with numbers converted to "X", to collapse "User 0",
       "User 1", etc into "User X"). This produces a much smaller output, and it is usually easy to
       quickly confirm that there is no private data in the stream.

       Reproducing some bugs may require referencing particular commits or paths, which becomes
       challenging after refnames and paths have been anonymized. You can ask for a particular token
       to be left as-is or mapped to a new value. For example, if you have a bug which reproduces
       with git rev-list sensitive -- secret.c, you can run:

           $ git fast-export --anonymize --all \
                 --anonymize-map=sensitive:foo \
                 --anonymize-map=secret.c:bar.c \
                 >stream


       After importing the stream, you can then run git rev-list foo -- bar.c in the anonymized
       repository.

       Note that paths and refnames are split into tokens at slash boundaries. The command above
       would anonymize subdir/secret.c as something like path123/bar.c; you could then search for
       bar.c in the anonymized repository to determine the final pathname.

       To make referencing the final pathname simpler, you can map each path component; so if you
       also anonymize subdir to publicdir, then the final pathname would be publicdir/bar.c.

LIMITATIONS
       Since git fast-import cannot tag trees, you will not be able to export the linux.git
       repository completely, as it contains a tag referencing a tree instead of a commit.

SEE ALSO
       git-fast-import(1)

GIT
       Part of the git(1) suite

Git 2.43.0                                   07/02/2025                           GIT-FAST-EXPORT(1)