Git Wrangler

Git operations, orchestrated at scale.

Cross-platform Go CLI for coordinating dozens of Git repositories in parallel, eliminating the manual overhead of managing large developer workspaces.

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Navigation

• Why Git Wrangler?
• Installation & Maintenance
• Quick Start
• Commands
• AI-Powered Workflows
• Safety & Guardrails
• Runtime Dependencies
• Shell Completions
• Development

Why Git Wrangler?

Managing many related Git repositories by hand is repetitive, slow, and easy to mess up. Git Wrangler turns that workspace into one coordinated unit.

It finds repositories below your current directory and runs Git workflows across them in one pass, with parallel execution, stable output, and safe defaults. Use --repo PATH on repository commands when you want to target exactly one repository instead of discovering everything below the current directory. Remote-aware commands such as status, info, review, and history rewrite planning refresh origin by default before inspecting remote-tracking refs. Use --no-fetch on those commands for offline or local-only runs.

What it gives you

• One command, many repositories — run common Git workflows across every repo.
• Parallel execution, stable output — fast runs without chaotic terminal output.
• AI-assisted commits — generate Conventional Commit messages from diffs.
• Safer history rewrites — rewrite metadata or remove secrets with confirmations.
• GitHub workflows — clone, rename, and manage repositories through gh.
• Single binary — portable Go executable; GitHub and history workflows use standard tools like gh and git-filter-repo.

Installation & Maintenance

Install

# macOS & Linux
brew install kaufmann-dev/tap/git-wrangler

# Windows
scoop bucket add kaufmann-dev https://github.com/kaufmann-dev/scoop-bucket.git
scoop install kaufmann-dev/git-wrangler

Tip

You can also install manually by downloading a standalone binary from GitHub Releases, extracting it, and adding it to your PATH. You will need to manually install runtime dependencies and set up shell completions, as these are not automatically handled like with Scoop or Homebrew (see Runtime Dependencies and Shell Completions).

Update

# Homebrew
brew update
brew upgrade git-wrangler

# Scoop
scoop update
scoop update git-wrangler

Uninstall

# Homebrew
brew uninstall git-wrangler
brew untap kaufmann-dev/tap

# Scoop
scoop uninstall git-wrangler
scoop bucket rm kaufmann-dev

Quick Start

# 1. Set up GitHub auth and AI credentials
git-wrangler init

# 2. Verify your setup
git-wrangler doctor

# 3. Check state across all repos in the current directory
git-wrangler status

# 4. See the full command list to decide what to do next
git-wrangler help

Most repository workflow commands support --guided to collect their command-specific options interactively before execution:

git-wrangler push --guided
git-wrangler rewrite-dates --guided

Guided setup requires both stdin and stderr to be terminals, prints the selected configuration to stderr, and cannot be combined with --json. Missing required values are prompted for in a terminal and fail in noninteractive runs. Pressing Ctrl+C or sending EOF with Ctrl+D cancels any active prompt immediately, stops the command before further work, and exits nonzero.

On browserless machines, init prints the GitHub device code and verification URL so authorization can be completed in a browser on another device. On machines without an available keyring, configure credentials through environment variables before running Git Wrangler:

export GIT_WRANGLER_GITHUB_TOKEN=...
export GIT_WRANGLER_AI_API_KEY=...

# OpenAI API keys may also use the provider-specific fallback:
export OPENAI_API_KEY=...

Git Wrangler does not resolve GitHub credentials from an inbound GH_TOKEN. It sets GH_TOKEN only when passing its own resolved credential to child gh processes.

Commands

Remote Operations

Command	What it does
clone	Clone multiple GitHub repositories for a user or org.
fetch	Fetch origin updates. Use --prune to prune stale refs.
pull	Pull latest changes for every discovered repository.
push	Push local commits to origin. --force uses lease-based.
rename-repo	Rename GitHub repositories through gh.

Local Operations

Command	What it does
commit	Generate and create one AI Conventional Commit per repo.
fix-gitignore	Add missing common generated-file patterns to .gitignore.
license	Add or replace MIT license files.
rename-branch	Rename a branch across repositories.
reset	Reset current branches to their origin counterparts.
review	Review unpushed changes across repositories.
untrack	Stop tracking files already covered by .gitignore.

History Rewriting

Command	What it does
remove-secrets	Purge sensitive files from Git history.
rewrite-authors	Rewrite author and committer identity.
rewrite-commits	Generate AI Conventional Commit messages, then rewrite history.
rewrite-dates	Redistribute commit timestamps or roll back rewritten history.

Utility

Command	What it does
activity	Show an aggregated commit activity calendar.
config	Show and edit Git Wrangler configuration.
doctor	Check runtime dependencies and local configuration.
info	Show detailed repository information.
init	Set up GitHub and AI credentials.
status	Show clean, dirty, ahead, behind, and remote state.
version	Print version metadata.
completion	Generate shell completion scripts.
help	Show help for Git Wrangler or a specific command.

AI-Powered Workflows

commit and rewrite-commits use any OpenAI-compatible chat completions API to generate Conventional Commit messages from your diffs.

# Set up credentials
git-wrangler init

# Or configure directly
git-wrangler config set ai.base-url https://api.openai.com/v1
git-wrangler config set ai.model gpt-4o
git-wrangler config set ai.api-key

# Optional gateway headers
git-wrangler config set ai.headers.X-Project-ID corp-dev-99
git-wrangler config set ai.headers.api-key

Safety & Guardrails

Git Wrangler is built for bulk Git operations, where small mistakes can affect many repositories at once. Destructive actions are therefore explicit, guarded, and designed to fail safely.

• Privacy by default — AI commands redact diff content before sending it to the API, including sensitive file contents and common secret patterns. Old commit messages are not sent as context.
• AI confirmation before staging — commit prepares context with a temporary index and stages the real index only after valid AI messages are available.
• Confirmation before mutation — history rewrite commands ask before making destructive changes. Noninteractive runs that reach a confirmation fail with guidance to pass --yes. Use --yes or -y only for intentional noninteractive runs; they skip confirmations but never fill required values.
• Safer force pushes — push --force uses --force-with-lease. Raw force push requires the separate --force-unsafe flag.
• Fail-safe bulk runs — per-repository failures do not stop the whole run. Git Wrangler reports all failures and exits nonzero if anything failed.
• Fresh remote-tracking refs — remote-aware reports and history rewrite planning run git fetch --prune origin by default, with --no-fetch for explicit offline/local-only runs.
• Origin preservation — history rewrite commands that use git-filter-repo restore the origin remote after it is removed.
• Exact date rollback — rewrite-dates --rollback restores the first stored original baseline from backup refs, even after repeated rewrites, replaying only new commits made after that baseline.
• Warnings on stderr — destructive operations warn clearly without polluting normal command output.

Runtime Dependencies

Tool	Required for
git	All repository operations (required).
gh	GitHub operations: clone, rename-repo.
git-filter-repo	History rewrites: remove-secrets, rewrite-authors, rewrite-commits, and normal rewrite-dates.

Run git-wrangler doctor to check what's available on your system.

Shell Completions

Homebrew and Scoop install completions automatically. For manual installs:

# Bash
git-wrangler completion bash > /etc/bash_completion.d/git-wrangler

# Zsh
git-wrangler completion zsh > "${fpath[1]}/_git-wrangler"

# Fish
git-wrangler completion fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/git-wrangler.fish

# PowerShell
git-wrangler completion powershell > git-wrangler.ps1

Development

Install the local development build without using Homebrew:

scripts/install-dev

The script installs git-wrangler with go install and defaults GOBIN to ~/.local/bin. Put that directory before Homebrew on your PATH:

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

Run local checks before opening changes:

scripts/test
scripts/check

After making changes, run the script again and test the command normally:

scripts/install-dev
git-wrangler version
scripts/test