Introduction
I’m currently working on Scirius, the web management interface for Suricata developed by Stamus Networks.
Scirius is able to fetch IDS signatures from external place and the backend is storing this element in a git tree. As Scirius is a Django application, this means we need to interact with git in Python.
Usually the documentation of Python modules is good and enough to develop. This is sadly not the case for GitPython. There is documentation but the overall quality it not excellent, at least for a non genuine Python developer, and there is some big part missing.
Doing a commit
Doing a commit is really simple once you have understand what to do.
You need to open the repository and work on his index which is the object you add file to commit to. In the following example, I want to add everything under the rules directory:
repo = git.Repo(source_git_dir)
index = repo.index
index.add(["rules"])
message = 'source version at %s' % (self.updated_date)
index.commit(message)
Set value in the configuration of a repository
It is possible to edit the configuration of a git repository with GitPython. To do that you need to get the config and
to use the set_value function. For example, the following code snippet create a repository and set user.email and user.name for that repository:
repo = git.Repo.init(source_git_dir)
config = repo.config_writer()
config.set_value("user", "email", "scirius@stamus-networks.com")
config.set_value("user", "name", "Scirius")
OSError 25: Inappropriate ioctl for device
I’ve encountered this fabulous exception when trying to do a commit in Scirius. The problem is only showing up when running the application in wsfcgi mode. It is documented in Issue 39 on GitHub but there is no workaround proposed.
The error comes from the fact the function used to guess the identity of the user running the application is called even if value are set in the config.
And this function is failing when it is called outside of a real session. This function is in fact trying to get things from environment but these value
are not set when the application is started by init. To fix this, it is possible to force the USERNAME environment variable.
Here’s how it is implemented in Scirius:
+ os.environ['USERNAME'] = 'scirius'
index.add(["rules"])
message = 'source version at %s' % (self.updated_date)
index.commit(message)
You can see the diff on GitHub