git-dumper

A tool to dump a git repository from a website.

Install

This can be installed easily with uv:

uv tool install git-dumper

Alternatively, you can install it via pip. Note that modern Python environments may require you to use a virtual environment or the --user flag to avoid conflicts:

# Using a virtual environment
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install git-dumper

# OR using the --user flag
pip install --user git-dumper

Usage

usage: git-dumper [options] URL DIR

Dump a git repository from a website.

positional arguments:
  URL                   url
  DIR                   output directory

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --proxy PROXY         use the specified proxy
  -X METHOD, --method METHOD
                        HTTP method to use for all requests (e.g. GET, POST)
  --any-status          accept any HTTP status code as long as the body is
                        non-empty and not HTML (e.g. targets that return 500
                        but still serve content)
  -j JOBS, --jobs JOBS  number of simultaneous requests
  -r RETRY, --retry RETRY
                        number of request attempts before giving up
  -t TIMEOUT, --timeout TIMEOUT
                        maximum time in seconds before giving up
  -u USER_AGENT, --user-agent USER_AGENT
                        user-agent to use for requests
  -H HEADER, --header HEADER
                        additional http headers, e.g `NAME=VALUE`
  --client-cert-p12 CLIENT_CERT_P12
                        client certificate in PKCS#12 format
  --client-cert-p12-password CLIENT_CERT_P12_PASSWORD
                        password for the client certificate
  -b BRANCH, --branch BRANCH
                        additional branch name to check for (repeatable)

Example

git-dumper http://website.com/.git ~/website

Custom arguments

Some targets don't serve the raw .git files in the usual way. The following arguments help with those cases.

HTTP Method

Some targets only serve the raw .git files over a non-GET method. Use -X/--method to change the HTTP method used for every request:

git-dumper -X POST http://website.com/.git ~/website

Ignore HTTP status

Some targets respond with a non-200 status (e.g. 500) while still returning the real content. Use --any-status to accept any status code as long as the body is non-empty and not HTML:

git-dumper --any-status http://website.com/.git ~/website

Disclaimer

Use this software at your own risk!

You should know that if the repository you are downloading is controlled by an attacker, this could lead to remote code execution on your machine.

Build from source

Simply install the dependencies with pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Then, simply use:

./git_dumper.py http://website.com/.git ~/website

How does it work?

The tool will first check if directory listing is available. If it is, then it will just recursively download the .git directory (what you would do with wget).

If directory listing is not available, it will use several methods to find as many files as possible. Step by step, git-dumper will:

• Fetch all common files (.gitignore, .git/HEAD, .git/index, etc.);
• Find as many refs as possible (such as refs/heads/master, refs/remotes/origin/HEAD, etc.) by analyzing .git/HEAD, .git/logs/HEAD, .git/config, .git/packed-refs and so on;
• Find as many objects (sha1) as possible by analyzing .git/packed-refs, .git/index, .git/refs/* and .git/logs/*;
• Fetch all objects recursively, analyzing each commits to find their parents;
• Run git checkout . to recover the current working tree