History filtering

Josh transforms commits by applying filters to them. As any commit in git represents not just a single state of the filesystem but also its entire history, applying a filter to a commit produces an entirely new history. The result of a filter is a normal git commit and therefore can be filtered again, making filters chainable.

Syntax

Filters always begin with a colon and can be chained:

:filter1:filter2

When used as part of an URL filters can not contain whitespace or newlines. When read from a file however whitespace can be inserted between filters (not after the leading colon). Additionally newlines can be used instead of , inside of composition filters.

Available filters

Subdirectory :/a

Take only the selected subdirectory from the input and make it the root of the filtered tree. Note that :/a/b and :/a:/b are equivalent ways to get the same result.

Prefix :prefix=a

Take the input tree and place it into subdirectory a. Note that :prefix=a/b and :prefix=b:prefix=a are equivalent.

Directory ::a/ (with trailing /)

A shorthand for the commonly occuring filter combination :/a:prefix=a.

File ::a (without trailing /)

Produces a tree with only the specified file in it’s root. Note that ::a/b is equivalent to ::a/::b.

Composition :[:filter1,:filter2,...,:filterN]

Compose a tree by overlaying the outputs of :filter1:filterN on top of each other. It is guaranteed that each file will only appear at most once in the output. The first filter that consumes a file is the one deciding it’s mapped location. Therefore the order in which filters are composed matters.

Inside of a composition x=:filter can be used as an alternative spelling for :filter:prefix=x.

Exclusion :exclude[:filter]

Remove all paths matching :filter from the input tree.

Workspace :workspace=a

Similar to :/a but also looks for a workspace.josh file inside the specified directory (called the “workspace root”). The resulting tree will contain the contents of the workspace root as well as additional files specifed in the workspace.josh file.

(see Working with workspaces)

Filter order matters

Filters are applied in the left-to-right order they are given in the filter specification, and they are not commutative.

For example, this command will filter out just the josh documentation, and store it in a ref named FILTERED_HEAD:

$ josh-filter :/docs:prefix=josh-docs

However, this command will produce an empty branch:

$ josh-filter :prefix=josh-docs:/docs

What’s happening in the latter command is that because the prefix filter is applied first, the entire josh history already lives within the josh-docs directory, as it was just transformed to exist there. Thus, to still get the docs, the command would need to be:

$ josh-filter :prefix=josh-docs:/josh-docs/docs

which will contain the josh documentation at the base of the tree. We’ve lost the prefix, what gives?? Because the original git tree was already transformed, and then the subdirectory filter was applied to pull documentation from josh-docs/docs, the prefix is gone - it was filtered out again by the subdirectory filter. Thus, the order in which filters are provided is crucial, as each filter further transforms the latest transformation of the tree.