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Survey Repo

Survey Repo

Every now and then I inherit maintenance of a new repository and want to get a quick overview of the code. I’ve come up with a series of Git commands and tools I use to make sense of a new repository, including Git history, contributors, and repository size. I have 2 “versions” of my survey checklist:

  • The short survey only uses git commands, and that is its only real dependency.
  • The long survey requires extra tooling, and is split up into commands I run against all repositories, and language-specific commands and tools for repositories containing Python, Bash, Java, and Go code (I may add more over time).

Note

The “long” survey is very detailed, but assumes you have a general idea of what you’re working with and which tools you’ll need to use to help understand a Git repository. You should not need to run every command listed on the page, and much of the tooling is optional.

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