NIP-17

Tracking Git Commits with Nostr

draft optional author:melvincarvalho

Reserves: kind 17

Do not merge until implemented, work in progress

Status: This NIP is an early draft and work in progress. Implementations are being developed which will incorporate what is learnt.

Introduction

Tracking Git Commits with Nostr enables use cases similar to:

but without central points of failure. The aim is to create continuous distributed software development processes, without having to rely on complex or centralized services. The first implementations will be designed to illustrate these use cases in more detail.

You need only know the nostr ID or bech32 form of a repo and you will be able to discover all versions, its origins and its history. The repo itself will be able to communicate with nostr.

Git object data is not designed to be stored in nostr, instead, nostr will store the signaling, update, version or commit data. Git object data will live in existing git repositories, github, gitlab, gitea, gogs, ssh, file system etc.

New Kind

A special event with kind 17, can be used to indicate git commit messages. This number was selected to be hopefully easy to remember : G-1-7.

New Tag

A new tag "c" will be used to store commit hashes from git a new version of the repo

Bech32

The prefix nrepo can be used in front ends that support it, to allow easier copy and paste. An example would be similar to the popular npub system e.g. nrepo1ris1683fw6n2mvhl5h6dhqd8mqfv3wmxnz4qph83ua4dk4006ezsrt5c24

Event Structure

{
  "id": "32-bytes lowercase hex-encoded sha256 of the the serialized event data",
  "pubkey": "32-bytes lowercase hex-encoded public key of the repo",
  "created_at": "git_author_date",
  "kind": 17,
  "tags": [
    ["c", "git hash", "recommended git URI"],
    ["e", "previous commit id"]
  ],
  "content": "arbitrary string",
  "sig": "64-bytes hex of the signature of the sha256 hash of the serialized event data, which is the same as the id field"
}

Git events over nostr have the following attributes:

created_at SHOULD be equal to git author date. This is the same number format as nostr.

tags MUST contain tag "c" which is equal to the hex-encoded git commit hash. Typically this will be a 40 character sha-1 hash, but git will soon be allowing sha-2 hashes too

MAY contain an entry identifying the previous commit, if one exists, in the form ["e", "<event_id>"].

Further tags can be developed in future to capture informative git information such as major/minor versioning.

pubkey SHOULD be associated with a given repo. This could be communicated out of band, or, for example MAY be included in a file in the root directory of the repo, nostr.json

content empty, reserved for future use

nostr.json

The design of this NIP is such that each repo will have a public key used to send updates to a relay. The repos itself will be able to interact with nostr.

That key SHOULD appear in the top level directory of the repo in a file called nostr.json

{
    "pubkey": "abcd123...",
    "nrepo": "nrepo1ris1683fw6n2mvhl5h6dhqd8mqfv3wmxnz4qph83ua4dk4006ezsrt5c24"
}

Optionally a bech32 "nrepo" field can be added for convenience of copy and paste

Extensions

The current NIP is designed to do one thing well. It can be combined with other NIPs to provide more holistic solutions in future.

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