GIT-MAINTENANCE(1)

📦
version 2.56.0 · 25 versions
, in arch rolling

✨ NAME ✨

git-maintenance — bestie, this is the manual page for running tasks that optimize your Git repository's data 💅 (yes, the page itself is GIT-MAINTENANCE(1), and we're about to make it make sense).

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

git maintenance run [<options>]
git maintenance start [--scheduler=<scheduler>]
git maintenance (stop|register|unregister) [<options>]
git maintenance is-needed [<options>]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Okay so picture this: you run tasks to optimize Git repository data, which speeds up your other Git commands and reduces how much storage the repo needs. Slay. That's the whole vibe.

Here's the thing though — Git commands that add repository data, like git add or git fetch, are optimized for a responsive user experience. They do not take the time to optimize the Git data, because those optimizations scale with the full size of the repository, while those user commands each perform a relatively small action. So the optimization has to happen somewhere else, bestie.

That's where git maintenance comes in — it gives you flexibility for how to optimize the Git repository. Iconic behavior, honestly.

🎀 SUBCOMMANDS 🎀

run

Run one or more maintenance tasks. If one or more --task options are specified, then those tasks are run in that order. Otherwise, the tasks are determined by which maintenance.<task>.enabled config options are true. By default, only maintenance.gc.enabled is true.

start

Start running maintenance on the current repository. This performs the same config updates as the register subcommand, then updates the background scheduler to run git maintenance run --scheduled on an hourly basis.

stop

Halt the background maintenance schedule. The current repository is not removed from the list of maintained repositories, in case the background maintenance is restarted later. So it's giving "pause, not delete" 💅

register

Initialize Git config values so any scheduled maintenance will start running on this repository. This adds the repository to the maintenance.repo config variable in the current user's global config, or the config specified by --config-file option, and enables some recommended configuration values for maintenance.<task>.schedule. The tasks that are enabled are safe for running in the background without disrupting foreground processes.

The register subcommand will also set the maintenance.strategy config value to incremental, if this value is not previously set. The incremental strategy uses the following schedule for each maintenance task:

  • gc: disabled.
  • commit-graph: hourly.
  • prefetch: hourly.
  • loose-objects: daily.
  • incremental-repack: daily.

git maintenance register will also disable foreground maintenance by setting maintenance.auto = false in the current repository. This config setting will remain after a git maintenance unregister command. Lowkey a little sticky, but that's the spec 🫶

unregister

Remove the current repository from background maintenance. This only removes the repository from the configured list. It does not stop the background maintenance processes from running. Important distinction, bestie.

The unregister subcommand will report an error if the current repository is not already registered. Use the --force option to return success even when the current repository is not registered.

is-needed

Check whether maintenance needs to be run without actually running it. Exits with a 0 status code if maintenance needs to be run, 1 otherwise. Ideally used with the --auto flag.

If one or more --task options are specified, then those tasks are checked in that order. Otherwise, the tasks are determined by which maintenance.<task>.enabled config options are true. By default, only maintenance.gc.enabled is true.

🔥 TASKS 🔥

commit-graph

The commit-graph job updates the commit-graph files incrementally, then verifies that the written data is correct. The incremental write is safe to run alongside concurrent Git processes since it will not expire .graph files that were in the previous commit-graph-chain file. They will be deleted by a later run based on the expiration delay. No cap, that's the whole safety story.

prefetch

The prefetch task updates the object directory with the latest objects from all registered remotes. For each remote, a git fetch command is run. The configured refspec is modified to place all requested refs within refs/prefetch/. Also, tags are not updated.

This is done to avoid disrupting the remote-tracking branches. The end users expect these refs to stay unmoved unless they initiate a fetch. However, with the prefetch task, the objects necessary to complete a later real fetch would already be obtained, making the real fetch faster. In the ideal case, it will just become an update to a bunch of remote-tracking branches without any object transfer. Literally the dream scenario ✨

The remote.<name>.skipFetchAll configuration can be used to exclude a particular remote from getting prefetched.

gc

Clean up unnecessary files and optimize the local repository. "GC" stands for "garbage collection," but this task performs many smaller tasks. This task can be expensive for large repositories, as it repacks all Git objects into a single pack-file. It can also be disruptive in some situations, as it deletes stale data. See git-gc(1) for more details on garbage collection in Git. So yeah, powerful but please respect it 💀

loose-objects

The loose-objects job cleans up loose objects and places them into pack-files. In order to prevent race conditions with concurrent Git commands, it follows a two-step process. First, it deletes any loose objects that already exist in a pack-file; concurrent Git processes will examine the pack-file for the object data instead of the loose object. Second, it creates a new pack-file (starting with "loose-") containing a batch of loose objects.

The batch size defaults to fifty thousand objects to prevent the job from taking too long on a repository with many loose objects. Use the maintenance.loose-objects.batchSize config option to adjust this size, including a value of 0 to remove the limit.

The gc task writes unreachable objects as loose objects to be cleaned up by a later step only if they are not re-added to a pack-file; for this reason it is not advisable to enable both the loose-objects and gc tasks at the same time. Not me warning you in advance 🙈

incremental-repack

The incremental-repack job repacks the object directory using the multi-pack-index feature. In order to prevent race conditions with concurrent Git commands, it follows a two-step process. First, it calls git multi-pack-index expire to delete pack-files unreferenced by the multi-pack-index file. Second, it calls git multi-pack-index repack to select several small pack-files and repack them into a bigger one, and then update the multi-pack-index entries that refer to the small pack-files to refer to the new pack-file. This prepares those small pack-files for deletion upon the next run of git multi-pack-index expire. The selection of the small pack-files is such that the expected size of the big pack-file is at least the batch size; see the --batch-size option for the repack subcommand in git-multi-pack-index(1). The default batch-size is zero, which is a special case that attempts to repack all pack-files into a single pack-file.

pack-refs

The pack-refs task collects the loose reference files and collects them into a single file. This speeds up operations that need to iterate across many references. See git-pack-refs(1) for more information.

reflog-expire

The reflog-expire task deletes any entries in the reflog older than the expiry threshold. See git-reflog(1) for more information.

rerere-gc

The rerere-gc task invokes garbage collection for stale entries in the rerere cache. See git-rerere(1) for more information.

worktree-prune

The worktree-prune task deletes stale or broken worktrees. See git-worktree(1) for more information.

💅 OPTIONS 💅

  • --auto — When combined with the run subcommand, run maintenance tasks only if certain thresholds are met. For example, the gc task runs when the number of loose objects exceeds the number stored in the gc.auto config setting, or when the number of pack-files exceeds the gc.autoPackLimit config setting. Not compatible with the --schedule option. When combined with the is-needed subcommand, check if the required thresholds are met without actually running maintenance.
  • --schedule — When combined with the run subcommand, run maintenance tasks only if certain time conditions are met, as specified by the maintenance.<task>.schedule config value for each <task>. This config value specifies a number of seconds since the last time that task ran, according to the maintenance.<task>.lastRun config value. The tasks that are tested are those provided by the --task=<task> option(s) or those with maintenance.<task>.enabled set to true.
  • --quiet — Do not report progress or other information over stderr.
  • --task=<task> — If this option is specified one or more times, then only run the specified tasks in the specified order. If no --task=<task> arguments are specified, then only the tasks with maintenance.<task>.enabled configured as true are considered. See the TASKS section for the list of accepted <task> values.
  • --scheduler=auto|crontab|systemd-timer|launchctl|schtasks — When combined with the start subcommand, specify the scheduler for running the hourly, daily and weekly executions of git maintenance run. Possible values for <scheduler> are auto, crontab (POSIX), systemd-timer (Linux), launchctl (macOS), and schtasks (Windows). When auto is specified, the appropriate platform-specific scheduler is used; on Linux, systemd-timer is used if available, otherwise crontab. Default is auto.

Part 1 done, bestie — more manual page energy is on the way 💖

💅 TROUBLESHOOTING 💅

okay so git maintenance is literally designed to make repo maintenance patterns simpler while keeping your wait time during Git commands as tiny as possible 🫶. There's a whole buffet of config options to customize the process, and the default maintenance options are all about operations that complete quickly — even on huge repositories. slay.

ngl, users sometimes find that scheduled maintenance tasks don't run as often as intended 😭. Here's the tea: every git maintenance run command takes a lock on the repository's object database, and that lock stops other concurrent git maintenance run commands from running on the same repository. Without this safeguard, competing processes could leave the repo in an unpredictable state. so it's giving protective, not petty 💅.

The background maintenance schedule runs git maintenance run processes on an hourly basis. Each run executes the "hourly" tasks. At midnight, that process also executes the "daily" tasks. At midnight on the first day of the week, that process also executes the "weekly" tasks. A single process iterates over each registered repository, performing the scheduled tasks for that frequency. The processes are scheduled to a random minute of the hour per client to spread out the load that multiple clients might generate (e.g. from prefetching) ⭐.

Depending on the number of registered repositories and their sizes, this process may take longer than an hour. In that case, multiple git maintenance run commands may run on the same repository at the same time, colliding on the object database lock 💀. This results in one of the two tasks not running. rip.

If you find that some maintenance windows are taking longer than one hour to complete, then consider reducing the complexity of your maintenance tasks. For example, the gc task is much slower than the incremental-repack task — but that comes at a cost of a slightly larger object database. Consider moving more expensive tasks to be run less frequently. balance, bestie 🧚.

Expert users may consider scheduling their own maintenance tasks using a different schedule than what's available through git maintenance start and Git configuration options. Those users should be aware of the object database lock and how concurrent git maintenance run commands behave 🙈. Further, the git gc command should not be combined with git maintenance run commands. git gc modifies the object database but does not take the lock in the same way as git maintenance run. If possible, use git maintenance run --task=gc instead of git gc. periodt.

The following sections describe the mechanisms put in place to run background maintenance by git maintenance start and how to customize them 👑

🌸 BACKGROUND MAINTENANCE ON POSIX SYSTEMS 🌸

The standard mechanism for scheduling background tasks on POSIX systems is cron(8) ✨. This tool executes commands based on a given schedule. The current list of user-scheduled tasks can be found by running crontab -l. The schedule written by git maintenance start is similar to this:

# BEGIN GIT MAINTENANCE SCHEDULE
# The following schedule was created by Git
# Any edits made in this region might be
# replaced in the future by a Git command.

0 1-23 * * * "/<path>/git" --exec-path="/<path>" for-each-repo --config=maintenance.repo maintenance run --schedule=hourly
0 0 * * 1-6 "/<path>/git" --exec-path="/<path>" for-each-repo --config=maintenance.repo maintenance run --schedule=daily
0 0 * * 0 "/<path>/git" --exec-path="/<path>" for-each-repo --config=maintenance.repo maintenance run --schedule=weekly

# END GIT MAINTENANCE SCHEDULE

The comments are used as a region to mark the schedule as written by Git 💖. Any modifications within this region will be completely deleted by git maintenance stop or overwritten by git maintenance start. so don't get attached to your edits in there, bestie 😭.

The crontab entry specifies the full path of the git executable to ensure that the executed git command is the same one with which git maintenance start was issued — independent of PATH. If the same user runs git maintenance start with multiple Git executables, then only the latest executable is used 👑.

These commands use git for-each-repo --config=maintenance.repo to run git maintenance run --schedule=<frequency> on each repository listed in the multi-valued maintenance.repo config option 🦋. These are typically loaded from the user-specific global config. The git maintenance process then determines which maintenance tasks are configured to run on each repository with each <frequency> using the maintenance.<task>.schedule config options. These values are loaded from the global or repository config values.

If the config values are insufficient to achieve your desired background maintenance schedule, then you can create your own schedule 💅. If you run crontab -e, then an editor will load with your user-specific cron schedule. In that editor, you can add your own schedule lines. You could start by adapting the default schedule listed earlier, or you could read the crontab(5) documentation for advanced scheduling techniques. Please do use the full path and --exec-path techniques from the default schedule to ensure you are executing the correct binaries in your schedule 🌟.

🌈 BACKGROUND MAINTENANCE ON LINUX SYSTEMD SYSTEMS 🌈

While Linux supports cron, depending on the distribution, cron may be an optional package that isn't necessarily installed 🙈. On modern Linux distributions, systemd timers are superseding it. icon behavior.

If user systemd timers are available, they will be used as a replacement of cron ✨.

In this case, git maintenance start will create user systemd timer units and start the timers. The current list of user-scheduled tasks can be found by running systemctl --user list-timers. The timers written by git maintenance start are similar to this:

$ systemctl --user list-timers
NEXT                         LEFT          LAST                         PASSED     UNIT                         ACTIVATES
Thu 2021-04-29 19:00:00 CEST 42min left    Thu 2021-04-29 18:00:11 CEST 17min ago  git-maintenance@hourly.timer git-maintenance@hourly.service
Fri 2021-04-30 00:00:00 CEST 5h 42min left Thu 2021-04-29 00:00:11 CEST 18h ago    git-maintenance@daily.timer  git-maintenance@daily.service
Mon 2021-05-03 00:00:00 CEST 3 days left   Mon 2021-04-26 00:00:11 CEST 3 days ago git-maintenance@weekly.timer git-maintenance@weekly.service

One timer is registered for each --schedule=<frequency> option 🎀.

The definition of the systemd units can be inspected in the following files:

~/.config/systemd/user/git-maintenance@.timer
~/.config/systemd/user/git-maintenance@.service
~/.config/systemd/user/timers.target.wants/git-maintenance@hourly.timer
~/.config/systemd/user/timers.target.wants/git-maintenance@daily.timer
~/.config/systemd/user/timers.target.wants/git-maintenance@weekly.timer

git maintenance start will overwrite these files and start the timer again with systemctl --user, so any customization should be done by creating a drop-in file, i.e. a .conf suffixed file in the ~/.config/systemd/user/git-maintenance@.service.d directory 💅.

git maintenance stop will stop the user systemd timers and delete the above mentioned files 🔥.

For more details, see systemd.timer(5) ⭐.

🍓 BACKGROUND MAINTENANCE ON MACOS SYSTEMS 🍓

While macOS technically supports cron, using crontab -e requires elevated privileges and the executed process does not have a full user context 😭. Without a full user context, Git and its credential helpers cannot access stored credentials, so some maintenance tasks are not functional. not the vibe.

Instead, git maintenance start interacts with the launchctl tool, which is the recommended way to schedule timed jobs in macOS 👑. Scheduling maintenance through git maintenance (start|stop) requires some launchctl features available only in macOS 10.11 or later.

Your user-specific scheduled tasks are stored as XML-formatted .plist files in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/. You can see the currently-registered tasks using the following command:

$ ls ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.git-scm.git*
org.git-scm.git.daily.plist
org.git-scm.git.hourly.plist
org.git-scm.git.weekly.plist

One task is registered for each --schedule=<frequency> option 🦋. To inspect how the XML format describes each schedule, open one of these .plist files in an editor and inspect the <array> element following the <key>StartCalendarInterval</key> element 🙈.

git maintenance start will overwrite these files and register the tasks again with launchctl, so any customizations should be done by creating your own .plist files with distinct names ✨. Similarly, the git maintenance stop command will unregister the tasks with launchctl and delete the .plist files.

To create more advanced customizations to your background tasks, see launchctl.plist(5) for more information 💖.

💜 BACKGROUND MAINTENANCE ON WINDOWS SYSTEMS 💜

Windows does not support cron and instead has its own system for scheduling background tasks 🎀. The git maintenance start command uses the schtasks command to submit tasks to this system. You can inspect all background tasks using the Task Scheduler application. The tasks added by Git have names of the form Git Maintenance (<frequency>). The Task Scheduler GUI has ways to inspect these tasks, but you can also export the tasks to XML files and view the details there 🌟.

Note that since Git is a console application, these background tasks create a console window visible to the current user 😭. This can be changed manually by selecting the "Run whether user is logged in or not" option in Task Scheduler. This change requires a password input, which is why git maintenance start does not select it by default 🙈.

If you want to customize the background tasks, please rename the tasks so future calls to git maintenance (start|stop) do not overwrite your custom tasks 💅.

🎀 CONFIGURATION 🎀

okay bestie, real talk: everything in this section is selectively included from the git-config(1) docs — the content is literally the same as what's over there, we just pulled it in so you don't have to tab-hop. 💖

  • maintenance.auto — a boolean, and it's the yes/no for whether some commands run git maintenance run --auto after they finish their normal work. defaults to true. lowkey the introvert of the config family: does its thing after the party's over. ✨
  • maintenance.autoDetach — so like, a ton of Git commands trigger automatic maintenance once they've written data into the repo. this boolean decides whether that automatic maintenance happens in the foreground or whether the maintenance process detaches and keeps running in the background. if it's unset, the value of gc.autoDetach is used as a fallback. defaults to true if both are unset — meaning the maintenance process will detach. 🦋
  • maintenance.strategy — a string, and it's giving "choose your fighter" ✨ — it lets you pick one of a few recommended strategies for repository maintenance. it affects which tasks run during git maintenance run, provided no --task=<task> arguments are provided. heads up: this setting impacts manual maintenance, auto-maintenance and scheduled maintenance, and the tasks that run may be different depending on the maintenance type. you can further tweak it with maintenance.<task>.enabled and maintenance.<task>.schedule — if those are set, they're used instead of the defaults provided by maintenance.strategy.

the possible strategies, bestie:

  • none: implies no tasks are run at all. this is the default strategy for scheduled maintenance. literally the "i'm not doing anything today" icon 💅
  • gc: runs the gc task. simple, classic, no notes.
  • geometric: performs geometric repacking of packfiles and keeps auxiliary data structures up-to-date. the strategy expires data in the reflog and removes worktrees that cannot be located anymore. and when the geometric repacking strategy would decide to do an all-into-one repack, it generates a cruft pack for all unreachable objects — objects that are already part of a cruft pack will be expired. this repacking strategy is a full replacement for the gc strategy and is recommended for large repositories. it's also the default strategy for manual maintenance. main character energy fr fr 👑
  • incremental: optimizes for performing small maintenance activities that do not delete any data. it doesn't schedule the gc task, but it runs the prefetch and commit-graph tasks hourly, the loose-objects and incremental-repack tasks daily, and the pack-refs task weekly. note that manual repository maintenance uses the gc task. so it's the chill "no deleting, just vibes" strategy 🌸
  • maintenance.<task>.enabled — boolean, controls whether the maintenance task with name <task> is run when no --task option is specified to git maintenance run. these config values are ignored if a --task option exists. by default, only maintenance.gc.enabled is true. everyone else is sitting in the group chat with read receipts on 🙈
  • maintenance.<task>.schedule — controls whether or not the given <task> runs during a git maintenance run --schedule=<frequency> command. the value must be one of "hourly", "daily", or "weekly". that's it, that's the list, no extras 🎀
  • maintenance.commit-graph.auto — integer. controls how often the commit-graph task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto. if zero, the commit-graph task will not run with the --auto option. a negative value forces the task to run every time. otherwise, a positive value implies the command should run when the number of reachable commits that are not in the commit-graph file is at least the value of maintenance.commit-graph.auto. the default value is 100. ⭐
  • maintenance.loose-objects.auto — integer. how often the loose-objects task should run as part of git maintenance run --auto. zero means the loose-objects task will not run with --auto. negative forces it every single time (iconic, unhinged). otherwise a positive value implies the command should run when the number of loose objects is at least the value of maintenance.loose-objects.auto. default is 100. 🔥
  • maintenance.loose-objects.batchSize — integer, controls the maximum number of loose objects written into a packfile during the loose-objects task. default is fifty thousand. use value 0 to indicate no limit — go off, no cap, literally 😭
  • maintenance.incremental-repack.auto — integer. how often the incremental-repack task should run as part of git maintenance run --auto. zero → not with --auto. negative → forced every time. otherwise a positive value implies the command should run when the number of pack-files not in the multi-pack-index is at least the value of maintenance.incremental-repack.auto. default is 10. 💜
  • maintenance.geometric-repack.auto — integer. how often the geometric-repack task should run as part of git maintenance run --auto. zero → nope, not with --auto. negative → every time, no skips. otherwise a positive value implies the command should run either when there are packfiles that need to be merged together to retain the geometric progression, or when there are at least this many loose objects that would be written into a new packfile. default is 6700. 🌈
  • maintenance.geometric-repack.splitFactor — integer, controls the factor used for the geometric sequence. see the --geometric= option in git-repack(1) for more details. defaults to 2. 🦋
  • maintenance.reflog-expire.auto — integer. how often the reflog-expire task should run as part of git maintenance run --auto. zero → not with --auto. negative → forced every time. otherwise a positive value implies the command should run when the number of expired reflog entries in the "HEAD" reflog is at least the value of maintenance.loose-objects.auto — yes, that's what it says, that's the documented text, we're not fixing it, we're reporting it 💀 — and the default value is 100. 🫶
  • maintenance.rerere-gc.auto — integer. how often the rerere-gc task should run as part of git maintenance run --auto. zero → not with --auto. negative → every time. otherwise a positive value implies the command should run when the estimated number of stale entries that would be pruned is greater than or equal to the configured value. default is 512. ✨
  • maintenance.worktree-prune.auto — integer. how often the worktree-prune task should run as part of git maintenance run --auto. zero → not with --auto. negative → forced every time. otherwise a positive value implies the command should run when the number of prunable worktrees exceeds the value. default is 1. 🍓

👑 GIT 👑

git — part of the git(1) suite. the whole squad, one family, you know how it is 🫶

and that's the whole page, bestie!! you made it to the end, i'm so proud 😭💖 this one's from Git version 2.56.0, dated 2026-09-27 — go forth and maintain, you absolute icon 🌟💅✨

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