Marmot

Marmot: the Meta Repo Management Tool.

Marmot helps regular people start to make sense of the many Git repositories around them, in a mad world that can't stop creating them. It gives agency back to individual developers who often have to cope with the entropy of sprawling, poorly-documented architectures that source their code from dozens of repositories in ways that make sense to but a few.

For more on this topic, see Why does Marmot exist?.

What it does

Once you tell Marmot which Git repositories you're working with, it gives you a way to categorize them and then operate upon all the Git repositories in a category as if they were a single Git repository. As much as one can, at least; Marmot is not meant to replace git submodules.

Marmot happens to store this information–meta data about how Git repositories are related to each other–in its own Git repository. That's the author's idea of a Meta Repo, in a nutshell. A developer's understanding of their environment is likely to change over time, leading to new ways of categorizing code. Might as well store that information in a Git repository, so you can experiment, roll back, or even share this information with others.

Once you can group Git repositories together and work with them as if they are a single unit, you can do new things, like finding code you remember (by name, but you don't remember where), tracing control flow from one repository's sources to another, and checking for consistency (i.e. is everyone using a reasonably current version of Node.js?).

---

Contents

For Users

Start with the basics:

• Installation
• Getting Started

Then learn more:

• Command Reference (Or run make all install followed by man marmot)
• Why does Marmot exist?

For Developers

If you are planning to contribute to Marmot in some fashion, these may be helpful:

• Architecture and Design Decisions
• CI/CD Jobs
• Task Automation
• Tools

---

Versions

• 0.6.2: Fix portability issue with find so it runs on Linux again.
• 0.6.1: marmot repo prune includes any un-registered repositories from categories.
• 0.6: Add marmot category rm to remove a repository from a category.
• 0.5.5: Store and link to absolute paths for repositories.
• 0.5.4: Bug fixes for empty category names and repository paths.
• 0.5.3: Omit inserting duplicate categories or repositories. Commands fail-fast.
• 0.5.2: Add marmot repo prune to remove and de-categorize repositories that don't exist anymore.
• 0.5.1: Add installation and manuals.
• 0.5: marmot exec operates on registered repositories and accepts an optional category.
• 0.4.1: Add --category criteria to marmot repo list.
• 0.4: marmot can be called from anywhere, not just the meta repo.
• 0.3.2: marmot category create adds the category to local metadata.
• 0.3.1: Standardize use of code in src/lib/.
• 0.3: Add marmot repo.
• 0.2: Add marmot category and marmot init.
• 0.1: Add marmot exec.