I worked on a project at Intel where I was heavily involved with extending git. The product's purpose was primarily to improve the possibilities to aggregate git projects and use binary data, in a similar way to the Android team's repo tool, but in Java instead of in Python.

I wanted to:

• extend my knowledge of git
• get some more practice with Modern C++ by writing a git client from first principles.

mygit is a minimal Git client implemented from scratch. The goal is to understand the internal mechanics of Git by re‑implementing a few core commands in C++. Rather than replacing Git, this project serves as a learning vehicle and a demonstration of how Git objects are created and read.

Why create another Git client?

• To gain a practical understanding of Git internals by writing them in C++.
• To demonstrate how common Git commands work under the hood.

Clone the repository and build the tool:

make

Hash a file:

./mygit hash-object <file>

This prints the file's SHA-1, mirroring Git's hash-object command.

Implemented commands:

• hash-object – create a Git blob from a file and print its SHA‑1.
• cat-file – read and optionally decompress an object by SHA‑1.

These commands provide the very basics for working with Git objects. Features such as commits, branches, or a full object database are not yet implemented. hash-object only handles a single file and always writes output to stdout. The cat-file implementation can output blob contents but lacks many options of the real Git command.

Planned features are limited to expanding existing commands and experimenting with additional plumbing operations. mygit is intentionally small and will not attempt to match all of Git's functionality.

This project is an early prototype. Only a few plumbing commands work, so expect missing features and potential bugs.

• make and g++
• OpenSSL development libraries (for SHA‑1)
• zlib development libraries (for object compression)

Make sure these packages are installed before building. If you are using a package manager, install the development headers for both OpenSSL and zlib and verify the tools were added to the system by running openssl version and zlib-flate -help.

make

This produces a mygit binary in the repository root.

./mygit hash-object <file>
./mygit cat-file <sha>

The examples mirror the real Git commands but are limited to the small feature set implemented here.