git diff on a bare repo

Question

I wanna see how much a repo changed in the last month on gitlab server side

cd /path/to/my/bare/repo.git/
git --git-dir . diff --shortstat "@{1 month ago}"
fatal: Unable to read log 'logs/refs/heads/master': No such file or directory

However it works fine in local checkout-ed working branch.

Is there a way to do this without too much hassle?

To avoid XY problem: I wanna run statistics through hundreds of repos on a Gitlab server

Answer 1

Try and make sure, when diff'ing in a bare repo, to specify two commits (or diff would default to the working tree, which doesn't exist in a bare repo ).

You don't need --git-dir .

However, using date when specifying a revision wouldn't work, as it is based on logs/refs , which doesn't exist in a bare repo

<refname>@{<date>}, e.g. master@{yesterday}, HEAD@{5 minutes ago}

A ref followed by the suffix @ with a date specification enclosed in a brace pair (eg {yesterday} , {1 month 2 weeks 3 days 1 hour 1 second ago} or {1979-02-26 18:30:00} ) specifies the value of the ref at a prior point in time.
This suffix may only be used immediately following a ref name and the ref must have an existing log ( $GIT_DIR/logs/<ref> ) .

Answer 2

I found this question because I was getting fatal: This operation must be run in a work tree

If you are getting the error (in your bare repo):

[ec2-user@xxxxx git]$ git diff 81dcb182e4d16b6894b69a5b31133b8d8ff6c5e2
fatal: This operation must be run in a work tree

Ensure you are providing two commit hashes to diff.(as HEAD is a symbolic ref)

[ec2-user@xxxxx git]$ git diff <BASE COMMIT HASH> <UPDATE COMMIT HASH>

Eg.

[ec2-user@xxxxx git]$ git diff 11dcb182e4d16b6894b69a5b31133b8d8ff6c5ex 81dcb182e4d16b6894b69a5b31133b8d8ff6c5e2