Git integration

magus writes three things into a repository, and no more:

• a managed section in .gitattributes, marking every declared output as generated and routing it to magus's merge driver;
• a merge.magus.driver registration in the clone's own git config, because a driver cannot be committed;
• the refresh hooks below, when the daemon starts.

All three are managed sections or single config keys. Nothing rewrites your history, your branches, or a hook body you wrote yourself.

Hooks hand off work, never do work

This is the rule, and it is not a performance target to aim at later. It decides whether a hook may exist at all.

A git hook runs on the critical path of a command the user did not ask magus to be part of. Someone typed git checkout. They are waiting on git, not on a build tool, and every millisecond a hook spends is stolen from an operation that had nothing to do with us. So the bar is not "fast enough". The bar is:

A magus hook may look up something already computed, or hand the work to something else and return. It may not do the work.

That is checkable by reading the hook, not by timing it. A hook that computes is disqualified even when it happens to be quick today, because the thing it calls will get slower and nobody will notice until it does.

Automatically disqualified, whatever the measured time:

• starting a language runtime to answer the question (a cold node, python, or deno process has lost before it has parsed anything);
• loading the workspace, evaluating magusfiles, or opening the knowledge graph;
• touching the network, including a cache the hook thinks is nearby;
• running a build, a test, a linter, a formatter, or a generator;
• enforcing policy locally - blocking a commit, rewriting a file, staging something on your behalf.

That last one is worth stating plainly, because it is the one every other tool reaches for. magus does not enforce in a hook. Enforcement belongs where it can be read, re-run, and argued with: a target, a gate, or a CI check. A hook that blocks is a hook people disable with --no-verify, and a disabled hook enforces nothing at all.

Every magus hook also fails open. The installed body ends in || true and sends its output to /dev/null, so a hook can never fail your git command, and a broken or half-installed magus is invisible to it. A hook that is not certain it is correct does nothing and says nothing.

The hooks magus installs

magus server start installs them, best-effort: a repository with no daemon never gets them, and a failure to write one is a warning, never a reason the daemon does not start.

Each is a history change that can stale the knowledge graph and the symbol index. Mercurial gets the same treatment through its update hook; jj has no hook support and gets none.

The body is one line:

magus server job sync-graph >/dev/null 2>&1 || true

That command is the whole point of the rule above. It does not reconcile anything. It enqueues a job on the already-running daemon and returns, so the reconciliation happens in the background, after your git checkout has finished, on a process that was going to be running anyway. The hook's own cost is one short-lived client that posts a message.

They are written into a managed section:

# BEGIN magus-refresh - do not edit this section manually
magus server job sync-graph >/dev/null 2>&1 || true
# END magus-refresh

Your own hook body, above or below that section, is preserved across every reinstall. Delete the section to remove the integration; the next magus server start puts it back.

The merge driver, and what it cannot do

Generated files conflict constantly and merge meaninglessly: the correct merge of build output is whatever regenerating produces, not a reconciliation of two byte streams. So each declared output glob gets a .gitattributes entry:

MAGUS.md merge=magus linguist-generated

merge=magus routes conflicts to magus vcs merge-driver, which git invokes per file. You never run that command yourself. linguist-generated is the other half, and it is the half that always works: it collapses the file in GitHub's diff view and keeps it out of language statistics.

A forge never runs a custom merge driver. merge=magus needs merge.magus.driver in a git config, which is per-clone and cannot be committed, so github.com computes mergeability with the plain three-way merge and reports conflicts your local git would have settled silently. The same is true of GitLab, Gerrit, and every merge queue. This is architectural, not a configuration gap, and no .gitattributes change will fix the conflict banner on a pull request.

A driver has a second limit: no VCS invokes a content merge driver when one side deleted the file, so a modify/delete conflict reaches you untouched no matter how it is configured.

Both are why the real answer is a bulk command rather than a per-file callback:

git merge origin/main
magus vcs resolve

magus vcs resolve classifies every conflicted path at once, regenerates once instead of once per file, settles the deletions a driver is never called for, and stages everything the regeneration touched so git rebase --continue does not refuse on a dirty tree. Conflicts in files magus does not generate are reported and left for you.

To settle a branch against its base without merging first, hand it the ref:

magus vcs resolve --against origin/main

That merges, resolves, and leaves the merge in progress for you to commit. It needs a clean tree, so backing the merge out cannot lose uncommitted work. Add --dry-run to see the classification and have the merge backed out again.

magus vcs resolve works on git, Mercurial and Jujutsu - all three implement conflict reporting. Only --against is git-only, because only git has a merge-starting implementation; on the others, merge the base in yourself and then run magus vcs resolve.

Merge, do not rebase

Reach for git merge origin/main, not git rebase origin/main. This is not a style preference. The rebase costs you three things the merge does not:

• A force-push. A rebase rewrites your commits, so the branch can only move with --force-with-lease. A merge only adds a commit, so a plain git push works.
• Everything stacked on you. A force-push moves the commits every dependent branch was built on, so each branch above yours needs the same treatment, in order, every time the base moves. A merge leaves them all valid.
• The conflict, repeatedly. A rebase replays each of your commits against the new base, so a generated file can conflict once per commit. A merge settles it once.

The usual reason to prefer a rebase is a linear history on the trunk, and a squash merge already gives you that: it collapses the branch to a single commit, so merge commits inside your branch never reach the trunk at all. If your project squash-merges, merging the base into your own branch is free.

Stacked pull requests

A stack is a chain of branches, each based on the one below it. Generated files are the usual reason one falls apart, and the mechanism is worth knowing.

When the bottom pull request is squash-merged, the trunk gains a new commit that is not an ancestor of the branch above, while that branch still carries its own copy of the commits that were just squashed. For hand-written files git copes: both sides made the same change, and a three-way merge recognizes that. For generated output it cannot. The trunk's output was regenerated from the bottom branch's sources alone, and the branch above holds output regenerated from both, so both sides changed the same region differently. That is a real conflict, in a file neither author edited.

Settle a stack from the bottom up, one branch at a time, each against its own base:

git switch feature-b          # the branch directly above what just merged
git merge origin/main
magus vcs resolve
git push

git switch feature-c          # then the next one up, against ITS base
git merge origin/feature-b
magus vcs resolve
git push

Every step is a merge, so nothing is force-pushed and settling one layer does not invalidate the layers above it. The same walk with rebases means redoing every branch above whichever one you touch.

Whose conflict is it

magus vcs resolve reports the paths it deliberately left alone. To answer the same question before you start a merge, ask the workspace - magus describe file reads the declarations rather than guessing from a path convention:

magus describe file MAGUS.md internal/describe/extract.go

role: output is generated: regenerate it, never hand-merge it, and do not bother reading its diff. role: source is yours, and an ordinary conflict.

When the driver is doing nothing

The driver's failure mode is quiet, and it looks like the opposite of a failure - git reports a conflict in a generated file it should have settled by itself. A file that both sides changed to the same bytes is the clearest tell, because that is the easiest merge there is.

The registration is a command line, held in one clone's config:

git config --get merge.magus.driver

It names a magus binary and a subcommand. If that command cannot run - the binary moved, or it predates the subcommand the registration names - the driver exits non-zero, and git reads a non-zero driver as conflict. Every file routed to it is then reported as conflicted whether it is or not, which inflates the count rather than raising an error.

magus rewrites the registration whenever it opens a workspace, so running a command that loads one repairs it; magus ls is enough. Two things stop that happening on their own: a magus that cannot load this workspace never reaches the refresh, and the vcs verbs skip it on purpose, because the refresh writes the tracked .gitattributes and those verbs run while that file may itself be unmerged.

magus vcs resolve does not depend on the driver - it reads the conflicted paths from git and regenerates - so it settles the inflated list too. A broken driver makes a conflict look worse than it is; it does not stop you fixing it.

Staging

magus vcs add stages what the workspace declares: sources, and the generated outputs a source change in the same commit accounts for. Anything undeclared is reported rather than swept in, which is the difference between it and git add -A.

It also skips generated output that nothing in the change accounts for - output that moved with no declared input behind it, which means either a different magus build produced it or a generator is not deterministic. Name such a path explicitly to stage it anyway.

Reading a change through git

magus diff reads a changeset the way this repository's conventions rank it: declared outputs folded away, the rest ordered by what they can break. Nothing about that requires leaving git. Reviewing your changes covers what it reports; this section is only how to reach it without typing a magus command.

Wire it as git's pager for diff, and plain git diff renders through magus:

git config pager.diff 'magus diff -'

That is the whole integration. git diff, git diff <ref>, and git diff --staged all work, because git hands its pager the entire patch on stdin and magus diff - reads a patch on stdin. Nothing is intercepted that you cannot get back: git --no-pager diff prints the raw patch, and git -c pager.diff=cat diff does the same for one invocation.

Prefer to opt in per command rather than always? An alias costs one line and leaves git diff alone:

git config alias.reading '!f(){ git diff "$@" | magus diff -; }; f'

Then git reading and git reading main read through magus, and git diff does not.

Why not an external diff or a difftool

GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF and diff.external are for a program that renders ONE file's diff: git calls them once per file, with seven arguments. Almost everything magus has to say is a property of the whole changeset - which projects rebuild, who owns them, what it costs, what to read first - so per-file invocation would mean printing the report once per file, or not at all. Wire magus there and it refuses, naming the pager setting above; it does not half-answer.

git difftool --dir-diff has the opposite problem. It copies the changeset into two temporary directories and runs the tool against those. magus refuses to run inside a temporary copy of a tree on purpose: the verdict would describe a workspace nobody ships, and anything regenerated would land in the copy. Per-file difftool is the external-diff mismatch again, with a prompt between each file.

The pager is the one git integration point whose contract already matches: the whole diff, once, on stdin.

The same shape in the other backends

This is not a git quirk. Every backend magus supports offers a diff-tool slot and a pager, and in each of them the tool slot is the wrong shape for the same reason - measured against the installed versions:

So the pager is the portable answer, and two settings make it work everywhere:

hg config --edit    # [pager] pager = magus diff -   and   [color] mode = off
sl config --user pager.pager 'magus diff -'
jj config set --repo ui.diff-formatter ':git'
jj config set --repo ui.pager '["magus", "diff", "-"]'

Jujutsu needs the extra line because its default diff is a side-by-side rendering rather than a patch; :git makes jj diff emit the unified form its pager then hands over. With that set, jj behaves like the rest.

Turn color off for the diff being handed over. A VCS colorizes when it believes it is writing to a terminal, and paging is exactly that case. A colorized patch has escape sequences in front of every header, so the headers no longer begin a line and nothing parses. magus refuses such a patch and names this as the cause rather than reporting an empty changeset, but the fix is upstream: --color=never, hg --config color.mode=off, or jj --config ui.color=never. git does not colorize into a pager by default and needs nothing.

Every temp-directory variant above is refused for one reason: magus declines to run against a copy of a tree, because the verdict would describe a workspace nobody ships and anything regenerated would land in the copy.

Reading a patch you did not produce

The same input works from anywhere a patch comes from - a colleague, a mail attachment, a stash, a code-review tool:

gh pr diff 123 | magus diff -

Both patch dialects parse: git's diff --git a/x b/x headers, and the bare --- a/x / +++ b/x pair that GNU diff -u and patch speak. A patch magus cannot read is refused rather than reported as an empty changeset.