scalar(1) Git Manual scalar(1)
NAME
scalar - A tool for managing large Git repositories
SYNOPSIS
scalar clone [--single-branch] [--branch <main-branch>] [--full-clone]
[--[no-]src] [--[no-]tags] [--[no-]maintenance] <url> [<enlistment>]
scalar list
scalar register [--[no-]maintenance] [<enlistment>]
scalar unregister [<enlistment>]
scalar run ( all | config | commit-graph | fetch | loose-objects | pack-files ) [<enlistment>]
scalar reconfigure [--maintenance=(enable|disable|keep)] [ --all | <enlistment> ]
scalar diagnose [<enlistment>]
scalar delete <enlistment>
DESCRIPTION
Scalar is a repository management tool that optimizes Git for use in
large repositories. Scalar improves performance by configuring advanced
Git settings, maintaining repositories in the background, and helping
to reduce data sent across the network.
An important Scalar concept is the enlistment: this is the top-level
directory of the project. It usually contains the subdirectory src/
which is a Git worktree. This encourages the separation between tracked
files (inside src/) and untracked files, such as build artifacts
(outside src/). When registering an existing Git worktree with Scalar
whose name is not src, the enlistment will be identical to the
worktree.
The scalar command implements various subcommands, and different
options depending on the subcommand. With the exception of clone, list
and reconfigure --all, all subcommands expect to be run in an
enlistment.
The following options can be specified before the subcommand:
-C <directory>
Before running the subcommand, change the working directory. This
option imitates the same option of git(1).
-c <key>=<value>
For the duration of running the specified subcommand, configure
this setting. This option imitates the same option of git(1).
COMMANDS
Clone
clone [<options>] <url> [<enlistment>]
Clones the specified repository, similar to git-clone(1). By
default, only commit and tree objects are cloned. Once finished,
the worktree is located at <enlistment>/src.
The sparse-checkout feature is enabled (except when run with
--full-clone) and the only files present are those in the top-level
directory. Use git sparse-checkout set to expand the set of
directories you want to see, or git sparse-checkout disable to
expand to all files (see git-sparse-checkout(1) for more details).
You can explore the subdirectories outside your sparse-checkout by
using git ls-tree HEAD[:<directory>].
-b <name>, --branch <name>
Instead of checking out the branch pointed to by the cloned
repository's HEAD, check out the <name> branch instead.
--single-branch, --no-single-branch
Clone only the history leading to the tip of a single branch,
either specified by the --branch option or the primary branch
remote's HEAD points at.
Further fetches into the resulting repository will only update the
remote-tracking branch for the branch this option was used for the
initial cloning. If the HEAD at the remote did not point at any
branch when --single-branch clone was made, no remote-tracking
branch is created.
--src, --no-src
By default, scalar clone places the cloned repository within a
<entlistment>/src directory. Use --no-src to place the cloned
repository directly in the <enlistment> directory.
--tags, --no-tags
By default, scalar clone will fetch the tag objects advertised by
the remote and future git fetch commands will do the same. Use
--no-tags to avoid fetching tags in scalar clone and to configure
the repository to avoid fetching tags in the future. To fetch tags
after cloning with --no-tags, run git fetch --tags.
--full-clone, --no-full-clone
A sparse-checkout is initialized by default. This behavior can be
turned off via --full-clone.
--maintenance, --no-maintenance
By default, scalar clone configures the enlistment to use Git's
background maintenance feature. Use the --no-maintenance to skip
this configuration.
List
list
List enlistments that are currently registered by Scalar. This
subcommand does not need to be run inside an enlistment.
Register
register [<enlistment>]
Adds the enlistment's repository to the list of registered
repositories and starts background maintenance. If <enlistment> is
not provided, then the enlistment associated with the current
working directory is registered.
Note: when this subcommand is called in a worktree that is called
src/, its parent directory is considered to be the Scalar
enlistment. If the worktree is not called src/, it itself will be
considered to be the Scalar enlistment.
--maintenance, --no-maintenance
By default, scalar register configures the enlistment to use Git's
background maintenance feature. Use the --no-maintenance to skip
this configuration. This does not disable any maintenance that may
already be enabled in other ways.
Unregister
unregister [<enlistment>]
Remove the specified repository from the list of repositories
registered with Scalar and stop the scheduled background
maintenance.
Run
scalar run ( all | config | commit-graph | fetch | loose-objects |
pack-files ) [<enlistment>]
Run the given maintenance task (or all tasks, if all was
specified). Except for all and config, this subcommand simply hands
off to git-maintenance(1) (mapping fetch to prefetch and pack-files
to incremental-repack).
These tasks are run automatically as part of the scheduled
maintenance, as soon as the repository is registered with Scalar.
It should therefore not be necessary to run this subcommand
manually.
The config task is specific to Scalar and configures all those
opinionated default settings that make Git work more efficiently
with large repositories. As this task is run as part of scalar
clone automatically, explicit invocations of this task are rarely
needed.
Reconfigure
After a Scalar upgrade, or when the configuration of a Scalar
enlistment was somehow corrupted or changed by mistake, this subcommand
allows to reconfigure the enlistment.
--all
When --all is specified, reconfigure all enlistments currently
registered with Scalar by the scalar.repo config key. Use this
option after each upgrade to get the latest features.
--maintenance=(enable|disable|keep)
By default, Scalar configures the enlistment to use Git's
background maintenance feature; this is the same as using the
enable value for this option. Use the disable value to remove each
considered enlistment from background maintenance. Use "keep" to
leave the background maintenance configuration untouched for these
repositories.
Diagnose
diagnose [<enlistment>]
When reporting issues with Scalar, it is often helpful to provide
the information gathered by this command, including logs and
certain statistics describing the data shape of the current
enlistment.
The output of this command is a .zip file that is written into a
directory adjacent to the worktree in the src directory.
Delete
delete <enlistment>
This subcommand lets you delete an existing Scalar enlistment from
your local file system, unregistering the repository.
RECOMMENDED CONFIG VALUES
As part of both scalar clone and scalar register, certain Git config
values are set to optimize for large repositories or cross-platform
support. These options are updated in new Git versions according to the
best known advice for large repositories, and users can get the latest
recommendations by running scalar reconfigure [--all].
This section lists justifications for the config values that are set in
the latest version.
am.keepCR=true
This setting is important for cross-platform development across
Windows and non-Windows platforms and keeping carriage return (\r)
characters in certain workflows.
commitGraph.changedPaths=true
This setting helps the background maintenance steps that compute
the serialized commit-graph to also store changed-path Bloom
filters. This accelerates file history commands and allows users to
automatically benefit without running a foreground command.
commitGraph.generationVersion=1
While the preferred version is 2 for performance reasons, existing
users that had version 1 by default will need special care in
upgrading to version 2. This is likely to change in the future as
the upgrade story solidifies.
core.autoCRLF=false
This removes the transformation of worktree files to add CRLF line
endings when only LF line endings exist. This is removed for
performance reasons. Repositories that use tools that care about
CRLF line endings should commit the necessary files with those line
endings instead.
core.logAllRefUpdates=true
This enables the reflog on all branches. While this is a
performance cost for large repositories, it is frequently an
important data source for users to get out of bad situations or to
seek support from experts.
core.safeCRLF=false
Similar to core.autoCRLF=false, this disables checks around whether
the CRLF conversion is reversible. This is a performance
improvement, but can be dangerous if core.autoCRLF is reenabled by
the user.
credential.https://dev.azure.com.useHttpPath=true
This setting enables the credential.useHttpPath feature only for
web URLs for Azure DevOps. This is important for users interacting
with that service using multiple organizations and thus multiple
credential tokens.
feature.experimental=false
This disables the "experimental" optimizations grouped under this
feature config. The expectation is that all valuable optimizations
are also set explicitly by Scalar config, and any differences are
intentional. Notable differences include several bitmap-related
config options which are disabled for client-focused Scalar repos.
feature.manyFiles=false
This disables the "many files" optimizations grouped under this
feature config. The expectation is that all valuable optimizations
are also set explicitly by Scalar config, and any differences are
intentional.
fetch.showForcedUpdates=false
This disables the check at the end of git fetch that notifies the
user if the ref update was a forced update (one where the previous
position is not reachable from the latest position). This check can
be very expensive in large repositories, so is disabled and
replaced with an advice message. Set
advice.fetchShowForcedUpdates=false to disable this advice message.
fetch.unpackLimit=1
This setting prevents Git from unpacking packfiles into loose
objects as they are downloaded from the server. The default limit
of 100 was intended as a way to prevent performance issues from too
many packfiles, but Scalar uses background maintenance to group
packfiles and cover them with a multi-pack-index, removing this
issue.
fetch.writeCommitGraph=false
This config setting was created to help users automatically update
their commit-graph files as they perform fetches. However, this
takes time from foreground fetches and pulls and Scalar uses
background maintenance for this function instead.
gc.auto=0
This disables automatic garbage collection, since Scalar uses
background maintenance to keep the repository data in good shape.
gui.GCWarning=false
Since Scalar disables garbage collection by setting gc.auto=0, the
git-gui tool may start to warn about this setting. Disable this
warning as Scalar's background maintenance configuration makes the
warning irrelevant.
index.skipHash=true
Disable computing the hash of the index contents as it is being
written. This assists with performance, especially for large index
files.
index.threads=true
This tells Git to automatically detect how many threads it should
use when reading the index due to the default value of
core.preloadIndex, which enables parallel index reads. This
explicit setting also enables index.recordOffsetTable=true to speed
up parallel index reads.
index.version=4
This index version adds compression to the path names, reducing the
size of the index in a significant way for large repos. This is an
important performance boost.
log.excludeDecoration=refs/prefetch/*
Since Scalar enables background maintenance with the incremental
strategy, this setting avoids polluting git log output with refs
stored by the background prefetch operations.
merge.renames=true
When computing merges in large repos, it is particularly important
to detect renames to maximize the potential for a result that will
validate correctly. Users performing merges locally are more likely
to be doing so because a server-side merge (via pull request or
similar) resulted in conflicts. While this is the default setting,
it is set specifically to override a potential change to
diff.renames which a user may set for performance reasons.
merge.stat=false
This disables a diff output after computing a merge. This improves
performance of git merge for large repos while reducing noisy
output.
pack.useBitmaps=false
This disables the use of .bitmap files attached to packfiles.
Bitmap files are optimized for server-side use, not client-side
use. Scalar disables this to avoid some performance issues that can
occur if a user accidentally creates .bitmap files.
pack.usePathWalk=true
This enables the --path-walk option to git pack-objects by default.
This can accelerate the computation and compression of packfiles
created by git push and other repack operations.
receive.autoGC=false
Similar to gc.auto, this setting is disabled in preference of
background maintenance.
status.aheadBehind=false
This disables the ahead/behind calculation that would normally
happen during a git status command. This information is frequently
ignored by users but can be expensive to calculate in large repos
that receive thousands of commits per day. The calculation is
replaced with an advice message that can be disabled by disabling
the advice.statusAheadBehind config.
The following settings are different based on which platform is in use:
core.untrackedCache=(true|false)
The untracked cache feature is important for performance benefits
on large repositories, but has demonstrated some bugs on Windows
filesystems. Thus, this is set for other platforms but disabled on
Windows.
http.sslBackend=schannel
On Windows, the openssl backend has some issues with certain types
of remote providers and certificate types. Override the default
setting to avoid these common problems.
SEE ALSO
git-clone(1), git-maintenance(1).
GIT
Part of the git(1) suite
Git 2.53.0 2026-02-01 scalar(1)
git 2.53.0 - Generated Thu Feb 19 07:39:53 CST 2026