Dura

Dura is a background process that watches your Git repositories and commits your uncommitted changes without impacting HEAD, the current branch, or the Git index (staged files). If you ever get into an "oh snap!" situation where you think you just lost days of work, checkout a dura branch and recover.

Without dura, you use Ctrl-Z in your editor to get back to a good state. That's so 2021. Computers crash and Ctrl-Z only works on files independently. Dura snapshots changes across the entire repository as-you-go, so you can revert to "4 hours ago" instead of "hit Ctrl-Z like 40 times or whatever". Finally, some sanity.

How to use

Run it in the background:

$ dura serve &

The serve can happen in any directory. The & is Unix shell syntax to run the process in the background, meaning that you can start dura and then keep using the same terminal window while dura keeps running. You could also run dura serve in a window that you keep open.

Let dura know which repositories to watch:

$ cd some/git/repo
$ dura watch

Right now, you have to cd into each repo that you want to watch, one at a time.

If you have thoughts on how to do this better, share them here. Until that's sorted, you can run something like find ~ -type d -name .git -prune | xargs -I= sh -c "cd =/..; dura watch" to get started on your existing repos.

Make some changes. No need to commit or even stage them. Use any Git tool to see the dura branches:

$ git log --all

dura produces a branch for every real commit you make and makes commits to that branch without impacting your working copy. You keep using Git exactly as you did before.

Let dura know that it should stop running in the background with the kill command.

$ dura kill

The kill can happen in any directory. It indicates to the serve process that it should exit if there is a serve process running.

How to recover

The dura branch that's tracking your current uncommitted changes looks like dura/f4a88e5ea0f1f7492845f7021ae82db70f14c725. In $SHELL, you can get the branch name via:

$ echo "dura/$(git rev-parse HEAD)"

Use git log or tig to figure out which commit you want to rollback to. Copy the hash and then run something like

# Or, if you don't trust dura yet, `git stash`
$ git reset HEAD --hard
# get the changes into your working directory
$ git checkout $THE_HASH
# last few commands reset HEAD back to master but with changes uncommitted
$ git checkout -b temp-branch
$ git reset master
$ git checkout master
$ git branch -D temp-branch

If you're interested in improving this experience, collaborate here.

Install

Cargo Install

1. Install Cargo
2. If you want run release version, type cargo install dura else type cargo install --git https://github.com/tkellogg/dura

By Source

1. Install Rust (e.g., brew install rustup && brew install rust)
2. Clone this repository (e.g., git clone https://github.com/tkellogg/dura.git)
3. Navigate to repository base directory (cd dura)
4. Run cargo install --path . Note: If you receive a failure fetching the cargo dependencies try using the local git client for cargo fetches. CARGO_NET_GIT_FETCH_WITH_CLI=true cargo install --path .

Mac OS X

This installs dura and sets up a launchctl service to keep it running.

$ brew install dura

Windows

1. Download rustup-init
2. Clone this repository (e.g., git clone https://github.com/tkellogg/dura.git)
3. Navigate to repository base directory (cd dura)
4. Run cargo install --path . Note: If you receive a failure fetching the cargo dependencies try using the local git client for cargo fetches. CARGO_NET_GIT_FETCH_WITH_CLI=true cargo install --path .

Arch Linux

$ paru -S dura-git

Nix / Nixos

Nix is a tool that takes a unique approach to package management and system configuration. NixOS is a Linux distribution built on top of the Nix package manager.

To run dura locally using pre-compiled binaries:

nix shell nixpkgs#dura

If you're willing to contribute and develop, dura also provides its own ready-to-use Nix flake.

To build and run the latest development version of dura locally:

nix run github:tkellogg/dura

To run a development environment with the required tools to develop:

nix develop github:tkellogg/dura

FAQ

Is this stable?

Yes. Lots of people have been using it since 2022-01-01 without issue. It uses libgit2 to make the commits, so it's fairly battle hardened.

How often does this check for changes?

Every now and then, like 5 seconds or so. Internally there's a control loop that sleeps 5 seconds between iterations, so it runs less frequently than every 5 seconds (potentially a lot less frequently, if there's a lot of work to do).

Brought to you by Tim Kellogg.