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Getting Started

Gitsheets is the toolkit for distributed recordkeeping that lives inside Git.

Overview

To prepare a repository for use with Gitsheets, all you need is a way to map a named sheet to a tree of normalized TOML files (containing one record per file).

Natural keys

Gitsheets works best with records that have natural keys, and doesn’t provide any mechanism out-of-the-box for assigning keys randomly/sequentially. If your records don’t yet contain any unique identifier, assign your own somehow before loading them into a git sheet.

Declare a sheet

To declare a sheet named todos for example, create a file in your git repository at .gitsheets/todos.toml:

[gitsheet]
root = "data/todos"
path = "user-${{ userId }}/${{ id }}"

This configuration declares two essential things about the todos sheet:

  • gitsheet.root declares the root path within the repository containing all records for this sheet - all .toml files under this path are considered to declare records - the path may contain any number of /s to nest the sheet’s root
  • gitsheet.path declares a template for finding the path to a given record - ${{ expression }} path components can use arbitrary javascript

The todos sheet can now be upserted and queried by any Gitsheets interface.

Upsert records

Record format

Records are stored one-per file in TOML format with keys sorted alphabetically:

completed = false
id = 181
title = "ut cupiditate sequi aliquam fuga maiores"
userId = 10

The goals of this serialization are to:

  • Consistently render records to a normal form, such that identical record content will produce the same content hash
  • Be decently readable in text and diff form
  • Be easy to hand-edit
  • Store basic data types consistently
  • Generate minimal diff noise

Querying records

  • Path templates are indexes