FR: Bootstrapping git-fetch-file

[khusmann]

Hey, awesome idea, super cool project!

The main friction I have using git-fetch-file is the install process -- it'd be nice to have a documented/standard pattern for bootstrapping git-fetch-file from a local repo, instead of requiring the user to globally install.

I'm imagining something like this: user downloads a repo, which would look something like this:

3rdparty/git-fetch-file.py
setup.sh
README
.git-remote-files
...

This way I could tell the user to simply run ./setup.sh after checking out the repo and it'd set up git-fetch-file for that repo -- and it'd be completely self-contained to that repo. As a bonus, when they git fetch-file pull, to update the other deps in the repo, they'd also get the latest version of git-fetch-file.py (because it could itself be listed in .git-remote-files!)

Taking this a step further -- you could provide a script to initialize this structure for new repos, so setting up git-fetch-file on a new repo would be as simple as

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/andrewmcwattersandco/git-fetch-file/refs/heads/main/bootstrap.sh | sh

[andrewmcwatters]

Hi @khusmann!

Thanks for your comments. I also agree. The installation process is not great. The repository is popular enough for others to submit us to Homebrew, but their authors discourage the package authors themselves from submitting utilities.

brew install git-fetch-file would be great. But yeah, that's still a global requirement.

Until someone submits us, or a user wants to integrate this as a local requirement, I agree with you that setup.sh is a great place for improvement.

I will put this on my to-do list! I love your idea of this being something someone can scope locally to different projects!

[khusmann]

Awesome! Since posting this I've had another couple ideas in this area:

1. Instead of creating a setup.sh, you could instead add an arg to git-fetch-file.py to set up aliases -- so running python 3rdparty/git-fetch-file.py --setup-aliases could set up your aliases instead. This way setup.sh could be reserved for repo authors (who could then call git-fetch-file.py --setup-aliases if they desire)

2. Instead of (or in addition to) publishing to homebrew, what if you published on pip? For a python project, this would give me the ability to have a self contained repo for a python project like the following:

my_module/__init__.py
my_module/...
pyproject.toml (or requirements.txt)
setup.sh

Running setup.sh would then set up and activate a .venv in my repo folder (via pyproject.toml or requirements.txt), and then call git-fetch-file.py --setup-aliases. Now I have a completely self-contained and reproducible setup.

[andrewmcwatters]

Love the --setup-aliases idea! I will look into publishing on pip, too. I think that's a pretty neat idea to have a self-contained way to use the utility.

[andrewmcwatters]

Wed Aug 13 11:50:07 MST 2025 - Registered `andrewmcwatters`, `andrewmcwattersandco` on PyPI