Powershell – Get file from bitbucket (git) from powershell

gitpowershell

I need to grab a single file from bitbucket (git) using powershell. Complicating matters I need to do so over http/https as the system I'm running powershell from does not have direct internet access (therefore ssh isn't an option). How can I do so?

I thought that perhaps I could grab it using Invoke-WebRequest and accessing the raw URL. For example: https://bitbucket.org/company/project/raw/HEAD/some/special/file.txt

But it appears to access that you have to authenticate. I've tried setting up authentication but I can't get it working.

I thought next I could just pull it from git using git archive:
git archive –remote=git://bitbucket.org/Company/project.git HEAD:some/path/file.txt but that also doesn't seem to work.

So how can I get a single file. I don't want to just do git clone because then I have to pull down (and store) 500MB worth of other files I don't care about in the repo which is an issue for two reasons

1) I have to have space to store all that data (at least temporarily)
2) Unless I want to tie up that storage permanently I have to re-download it each time I need the file.

The file I need is 10KB so to tie up 500MB for a 10kb file seems absurd.

What's the answer? There's got to be a way to get Invoke-WebRequest to authenticate properly or just download a single file? Can any git gurus – particularly with powershell/windows backgrounds help?

Thanks!
Brad

Best Answer

BitBucket appears to have a pretty standard REST API you can use with Invoke-WebRequest or Invoke-RestMethod.

Here are some links to their documentation: Authentication and GET raw content. The gist of those doc pages is that they support basic authentication and GET requests for raw file contents. So from your example, you'd need to do something like this:

# create a credential variable for your account
$cred = Get-Credential

# modify the base URL to hit the API endpoint instead of the standard web endpoint, pass the credentials with the request, and send the output to a file
Invoke-RestMethod -Credential $cred -Uri https://api.bitbucket.org/1.0/repositories/company/project/raw/HEAD/some/special/file.txt -OutFile .\file.txt

The Standard Solution

If you put all the developers in a specially-created group, you can, in principle, just do:

chgrp -R <whatever group> gitrepo
chmod -R g+swX gitrepo

Then change the umask for the users to 002, so that new files get created with group-writable permissions.

The problems with this are legion; if you’re on a distro that assumes a umask of 022 (such as having a common users group that includes everyone by default), this can open up security problems elsewhere. And sooner or later, something is going to screw up your carefully crafted permissions scheme, putting the repo out of action until you get root access and fix it up (i.e., re-running the above commands).

The New-Wave Solution

A superior solution—though less well understood, and which requires a bit more OS/tool support—is to use POSIX extended attributes. I’ve only come to this area fairly recently, so my knowledge here isn’t as hot as it could be. But basically, an extended ACL is the ability to set permissions on more than just the 3 default slots (user/group/other).

So once again, create your group, then run:

setfacl -R -m g:<whatever group>:rwX gitrepo
find gitrepo -type d | xargs setfacl -R -m d:g:<whatever group>:rwX

This sets up the extended ACL for the group so that the group members can read/write/access whatever files are already there (the first line); then, also tell all existing directories that new files should have this same ACL applied (the second line).

Hope that gets you on your way.

Git fetch specific revision from remote repository

Once you've pulled the repository you should be able to go:

git checkout 3ef0d...

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Git – How to Share a Git Repository with Multiple Users on a Machine

The Standard Solution

The New-Wave Solution

Git fetch specific revision from remote repository

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