sapling/README.md

EdenSCM

EdenSCM is a cross-platform, highly scalable source control management system.

It aims to provide both user-friendly and powerful interfaces for users, as well as extreme scalability to deal with repositories containing many millions of files and many millions of commits.

EdenSCM is comprised of three main components:

• The eden CLI: The client-side command line interface for users to interact with EdenSCM.
• Mononoke: The server-side part of EdenSCM.
• EdenFS: A virtual filesystem for efficiently checking out large repositories.

EdenSCM's scalability goals are to ensure that all source control operations scale with the number of files in use by a developer, and not with the size of the repository itself. This enables fast, performant developer experiences even in massive repositories with many long files and very long commit histories.

The eden CLI

The eden CLI was originally based on Mercurial, and shares many aspects of the UI and features of Mercurial.

The CLI code can be found in the eden/scm subdirectory.

Building the eden CLI

The eden CLI currently builds and runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows. The setup.py script is the main interface for building the CLI.

Mononoke

Mononoke is the server-side component of EdenSCM.

Despite having originally evolved from Mercurial, EdenSCM is not a distributed source control system. In order to support massive repositories, not all repository data is downloaded to the client system when checking out a repository. Clients ideally only download the minimal amount of data necessary, and then fetch additional data from the server as it is needed.

Building Mononoke

The Mononoke code lives under eden/mononoke

Mononoke currently builds and runs only on Linux, and is not yet buildable outside of Facebook's internal environment. Work is still in progress to support building Mononoke with Rust's cargo build system.

EdenFS

EdenFS is a virtual file system for managing EdenSCM checkouts.

EdenFS speeds up operations in large repositories by only populating working directory files on demand, as they are accessed. This makes operations like checkout much faster, in exchange for a small performance hit when first accessing new files. This is quite beneficial in large repositories where developers often only work with a small subset of the repository at a time.

EdenFS has similar performance advantages to using sparse checkouts, but a much better user experience. Unlike with sparse checkouts, EdenFS does not require manually curating the list of files to check out, and users can transparently access any file without needing to update the profile.

EdenFS also keeps track of which files have been modified, allowing very efficient status queries that do not need to scan the working directory. The filesystem monitoring tool Watchman also integrates with EdenFS, allowing it to more efficiently track updates to the filesystem.

Building EdenFS

EdenFS currently builds on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

The recommended way to build EdenFS is using the build.sh script in the top-level of the repository. This script will download and build all of the necessary dependencies for EdenFS, before building EdenFS itself. On Windows use the build.bat script instead of build.sh.

This build script will create an output directory outside of the repository where it will perform the build. You can control this output directory location by passing a --scratch-path argument to the build script.

Support

EdenSCM is the primary source control system used at Facebook, and is used for Facebook's main monorepo code base.

Support for using EdenSCM outside of Facebook is still highly experimental. While we would be interested to hear feedback if you run into issues, supporting external users is not currently a high priority for the development team, so we unfortunately cannot guarantee prompt support at this time.

License

See LICENSE.