Can the gitoxide library do the equivalent of git clone --mirror REPO?

[bradlarsen]

Gitoxide is used for walking Git repository objects in Nosey Parker, a fast detector of hardcoded secrets.

I'm adding functionality to Nosey Parker to be able to scan for secrets in a Git repository without first manually cloning it; instead, just specifying the URL will be enough. In this secrets detection use case, it's preferable to clone Git repositories with the --mirror option, as that may make additional objects accessible relative to a regular git clone.

The code in Nosey Parker is currently shelling out to the git binary, which is suboptimal in many ways. I'd rather do the mirrored cloning programmatically. In a previous implementation, I had tried to use libgit2, but its support for mirrored cloning was brittle and differed behavior-wise from the canonical git program.

Can the gitoxide library do the equivalent of git clone --mirror REPO? I couldn't figure this out from perusing API docs. I'd love to use gitoxide instead.

Thanks in advance!

[Byron]

At this time mirror isn't directly supported. After short investigation, it would mean the following to implement it.

1. fetch every ref there is on the remote
2. set the remote.origin.mirror key to true in the remote configuration to make pushes behave like a mirror (and probably push everything each time), and fetch all refs in all future fetches.

For clones one would be able to configure the ref-specs prior to the clone to capture all refs advertised by the remote, and for fetches one could do the same, even on the caller side. If you were inclined to implemented on your end, then I believe that would already work. I have also put it into the roadmap (search for --mirror) for eventual implementation, but there is no timeline and I can't promise it's going to happen this year.

[bradlarsen]

Thanks @Byron !