Mirrors repositories from their code host. All other Sourcegraph services talk to gitserver when they need data from git. Requests for fetch operations, however, go through repo-updater.

gitserver exposes an "exec" API over HTTP for running git commands against clones of repositories. gitserver also exposes APIs for the management of clones.

The management of clones comprises most of the complexity in gitserver since:

• We want to avoid concurrent clones and fetches of the same repository.
• We want to limit the number of concurrent clones and fetches.
• When adding/removing/modifying a clone, concurrent attempts to run commands needs to be gracefully dealt with.
• We need to be robust against the many ways git clones can degrade. (gc, interrupted clones)

Additionally we have invested heavily in the observability of gitserver. Nearly every operation Sourcegraph does runs one or more git commands. So we have detailed observability in prometheus, net/event, jaeger, honeycomb and stderr logs.

We normalize repository names when storing them on disk. Always use protocol.NormalizeRepo. The $GIT_DIR of a repository is at reposRoot/normalized_name/.git.

When doing an operation on a file or directory which may be concurrently read/written please use atomic filesystem patterns. This usually involves heavy use of os.Rename. Search for existing uses of os.Rename to see examples.

gitserver's memory usage consists of short lived git subprocesses.

This is an IO and compute heavy service since most Sourcegraph requests will trigger 1 or more git commands. As such we shard requests for a repo to a specific replica. This allows us to horizontally scale out the service.

The service is stateful (maintaining git clones). However, it only contains data mirrored from upstream code hosts.

Syncing of Perforce depots is accomplished by either p4-fusion or git p4 (deprecated), both of which clone Perforce depots into Git repositories in gitserver.

To use p4-fusion while developing Sourcegraph, there are a couple of options.

Run gitserver in a Docker container. This is the option that gives an experience closest to a deployed Sourcegraph instance, and will work for any platform/OS on which you're developing (running sg start).

Native binaries are provided through Bazel, built via Nix in our fork of p4-fusion. It can be invoked either through ./dev/p4-fusion-dev or directly with bazel run //dev/tools:p4-fusion.