Automatic Metadata Management

gittuf ships with a program (git-remote-gittuf) known as a Git remote helper, which is used by your computer to talk with Git servers (e.g. GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, etc…). Because of this, it must be invoked every time you run commands such as git pull or git push, and serves as a reliable place to run common gittuf tasks. The transport automatically does the following for you:

Create RSL Entries as needed
Synchronize gittuf metadata
Verify that the repository is compliant with gittuf policy

This means that you need not interact with gittuf to do the work you already do on your Git repository. There is one exception: Approving Changes with multiple users required.

If you are a maintainer, you can use the gittuf transport, but will still need to interact with gittuf manually to set policies. See Part 4: gittuf for Maintainers for more information.

Automatic metadata management is performed whenever you are interacting with a Git remote whose URL has gittuf:: prepended to it.

For example, if you push to GitHub using https, your Git remote will be:

https://github.com/user/repository.git

If we wanted to use automatic metadata management for gittuf for this repository, we need to only add gittuf:: to the beginning of this URL, like so:

gittuf::https://github.com/user/repository.git

Enabling Automatic Metadata Management

If you haven’t cloned the repository you need to work on yet, simply add the gittuf:: prefix to the URL where your Git repository is located. For example,

git clone gittuf::git@github.com:owner/repo

If you have cloned the repository you need to work on, navigate to it, and then update the remote server URL from which you fetch changes from. For example, if your default server is origin (in most cases), run:

git remote set-url origin gittuf::git@github.com:owner/repo

Disabling Automatic Metadata Management

Disabling gittuf’s automatic metadata management for a repository simply requires removing the gittuf:: prefix from the remote URL. For example, if your default server is origin, run:

git remote set-url origin git@github.com:owner/repo

Next: Manual Metadata Management

Next, let’s take a look at how gittuf metadata is managed manually, without git-remote-gittuf with Manual Metadata Management.