Git size of repository

I have some repositories that keep growing in size, so far this has not presented a problem for me, but I can not help but thing that at some point in the future it will sooner or later. So for now I thought I would take a moment tot just fool around with a test git folder, and do a little research on how to know how big a git repository is to begin with at least.

In late versions of git there is the git count-objects command that can be used to know how many objects there are and there disk consumption. So this might be the best way to know how much space a git folder is taking up assuming that I will always be using a late version of git that will support this.

1 - Creating a test repo and using git count-objects

I often find that it might be best to start over with a test repository rather than a clone of a repository that I might end up accidentally pushing changes to. So in this section I will be creating a whole new repository with git, and then use the git count-objects command to track the size of the repository.

1.1 - create the test repo

First off I create a new repository with the git init command in a new folder.

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$ mkdir git_test
$ cd git_test
$ git init

1.2 - Add something to it and create a first commit

I will then want to add something to it such as a dummy README file. Anything will do for this example at least just so that I add some content of some kind or another.

1	$ nano README.md

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## git-test
 
This is only a test

And a first commit.

1 2	$ git add * $ git commit -m "first commit"

1.3 - Use the git count-objects command

So now I just need to call the git count-objects command in the git folder to get a count of all the objects, and a size value. If I call it without any arguments I get a size in kilobytes.

1 2	$ git count-objects 3 objects, 0 kilobytes

However there are some options that can result in a more detailed output of what is going on so far in this test repository. By passing the v option I get a more verbose output. On top of that there is also the uppercase H option that will give the output in a more Human readable form.

$ git count-objects -vH
git count-objects -vH
count: 3
size: 225 bytes
in-pack: 0
packs: 0
size-pack: 0 bytes
prune-packable: 0
garbage: 0
size-garbage: 0 bytes

2 - Using the github API to gain a sense as to how large a full repo is

Anoher way to get an idea of how large a repo is there is the github API if it is a public repo. The linux curl command can be used to pull down the JSON data of a repo, and then redireciton can be used push status info to dev\/null. Then end reult of the JSON data can then be piped to grep to get just the size key of the JSON.

1 2	$ curl https://api.github.com/repos/mrdoob/three.js 2> /dev/null \| grep size "size": 1273732,

Conclusion

That will be it for now when it comes to the size of a git folder. There might be a great deal more to write about with this one when I get around to expanding on this subject a bit more when more things come up. There is just keeping in mind that I can not just cd into the root folder and do a linux du command to get an idea of the size. There is the question if the local repo is a deep clone or not, and there are just a lot of factors at play here when it comes to knowing what the actaul size is.