Gitballs 🎱 🏀 ⚽
An investigation into storing package manager release tarballs in a space efficient way using git.
Theory
Each release of a library to a package manager is usually a few line changes, but is stored as a complete copy of the changes, git is good at efficiently storing diffs so perhaps we can put each release in a git repo as a commit and see how much smaller the result will be.
Results
Rubygems
| gem name | # of releases | tarball size | gitball size | % saving | saving |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| split | 48 | 2.5M | 380K | 85 | 2.12MB |
| redis | 52 | 1.7M | 400K | 76 | 1.3MB |
| capistrano | 82 | 7.0M | 772K | 89 | 6.23MB |
| rake | 71 | 7.0M | 624K | 91 | 6.38MB |
| bundler | 225 | 42M | 1.9M | 95 | 40MB |
| rails | 288 | 159M | 7.4M | 95 | 152MB |
| nokogiri | 94 | 275M | 33M | 88 | 242MB |
| sass | 309 | 74M | 2.0M | 97 | 72MB |
| font-awesome-rails | 34 | 55M | 16M | 70 | 39MB |
| i18n-active_record | 4 | 52K | 360K | -590 | -308KB |
NPM
| module name | # of releases | tarball size | gitball size | % saving | saving |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| base62 | 6 | 36K | 100K | -277 | -64KB |
| express | 274 | 23M | 9.8M | 57 | 13.2MB |
| mocha | 118 | 10M | 1.1M | 89 | 8.9MB |
| node-sass | 94 | 111M | 22M | 80 | 89MB |
| request | 111 | 6.7M | 844K | 87 | 5.86MB |
| left-pad | 11 | 52K | 348K | -569 | -296KB |
| react | 87 | 40M | 4.8M | 88 | 35.2MB |
| chai | 64 | 3.4M | 780K | 77 | 2.62MB |
| lodash | 88 | 79M | 8.1M | 90 | 70.9MB |
| bootstrap | 13 | 15M | 4.4M | 71 | 10.6MB |
Installation
gem install gitballs
CLI
gitballs init <purl> # Download and compress package versions into git repo
gitballs stats <path> # Show stats for an existing gitballs repo
gitballs version # Show version
Options:
-
-o, --output DIR- Output directory (default: ./gitballs/) -
-q, --quiet- Suppress progress output
Examples:
gitballs init pkg:gem/rails
gitballs init pkg:npm/lodash --output ./lodash-repo
gitballs init pkg:gem/nokogiri --quiet
gitballs stats ./gitballs/rails