PureGit

A fully functional Git-like VCS implementation in pure PHP — no external git binary, no shell_exec, no proc_open.

Requirements

• PHP 8.4+
• Extensions: ext-hash, ext-zlib, ext-json, ext-mbstring, ext-ctype, ext-curl

Installation

composer require lukasojd/pure-git

CLI Usage

# Initialize a repository
bin/puregit init [<directory>]

# Add files to the index
bin/puregit add <pathspec>...
bin/puregit add .

# Commit staged changes
bin/puregit commit -m "Your commit message"

# Show status
bin/puregit status

# View commit history
bin/puregit log [-n <count>]

# Show diff
bin/puregit diff [--cached]

# Branch operations
bin/puregit branch                  # list branches
bin/puregit branch <name>           # create branch
bin/puregit branch -d <name>        # delete branch

# Switch branches
bin/puregit checkout <branch>

# Tag operations
bin/puregit tag                     # list tags
bin/puregit tag <name>              # lightweight tag
bin/puregit tag -a <name> -m <msg>  # annotated tag
bin/puregit tag -d <name>           # delete tag

# Merge
bin/puregit merge <branch>

# Reset
bin/puregit reset [--soft|--mixed|--hard] <commit>

# Show object
bin/puregit show [<object>]

# Clone a repository (HTTP/HTTPS or git:// protocol)
bin/puregit clone <url> [<directory>]
bin/puregit clone --bare <url> [<directory>]

# Commit graph (fast commit counting)
bin/puregit commit-graph write
bin/puregit commit-graph verify

# Remove / Move files
bin/puregit rm [--cached] <file>...
bin/puregit mv <source> <destination>

API Usage

use Lukasojd\PureGit\Application\Service\Repository;
use Lukasojd\PureGit\Application\Handler\AddHandler;
use Lukasojd\PureGit\Application\Handler\CommitHandler;
use Lukasojd\PureGit\Application\Handler\LogHandler;

// Initialize
$repo = Repository::init('/path/to/repo');

// Or open existing
$repo = Repository::open('/path/to/repo');

// Add files
$add = new AddHandler($repo);
$add->handle(['file.txt']);

// Commit
$commit = new CommitHandler($repo);
$commitId = $commit->handle('Initial commit');

// Log
$log = new LogHandler($repo);
$commits = $log->handle(10);

Architecture

Hexagonal architecture with clean separation:

• src/Domain/ — Value objects, interfaces, exceptions (no dependencies)
• src/Application/ — Command handlers, service layer
• src/Infrastructure/ — File system, object storage, refs, index, diff, merge
• src/CLI/ — Command-line interface
• src/Support/ — Binary reader/writer, path utilities

See docs/architecture.md for details.

Quality Assurance

# Run full QA pipeline
composer qa

# Individual tools
composer ecs:check     # coding standard (ECS)
composer stan          # static analysis (PHPStan level max)
composer rector:check  # refactoring check (Rector)
composer test          # PHPUnit tests
composer test:coverage # tests with coverage report

Performance

Delta encoding with sliding window (window=10, max depth=50) achieves ~77% compression ratio on similar objects. Packs use OFS_DELTA format. Transport streams packs directly to disk with a bounded FIFO cache (32 MB) for index building, keeping memory usage predictable regardless of repository size.

Local operations

Benchmarked against PHPUnit bare repository (231 MB, 27k commits, 3576 files):

Operation	Time	Peak Memory
Read HEAD commit	25 ms	34 MB
Walk 3576 files	10 ms	34 MB
Log 1000 commits	13 ms	34 MB
Read all blobs	235 ms	92 MB
Count all commits (commit-graph)	2 ms	36 MB
Count all commits (BFS)	283 ms	62 MB

Clone (HTTP transport)

Repository	Objects	PureGit	Native git	Ratio	Peak Memory
defunkt/dotjs	872	0.84 s	0.70 s	1.2x	< 32 MB
sebastianbergmann/phpunit	232K	25.1 s	9.8 s	2.6x	< 256 MB

Limitations

• No submodule support
• No sparse checkout

License

MIT License. See LICENSE.