Download the PHP package se7enxweb/git_manager without Composer

Git Manager

Git Manager is an Exponential extension that puts the installation's git checkout and its backups into the administration. An administrator can switch branches, check out a commit, compare the checked out branch with its branch on a remote, fetch, push, manage remotes and submodules, browse the whole commit log, and make, encrypt, download and remove site backups, all from the browser.

It is meant for sites where git is installed on the server but nobody has (or should need) a shell: shared hosting, managed servers, and teams that deploy by switching a branch rather than by typing commands. Everything it does is also available from the command line, for those who do have one.

Contents

• Features
• Requirements
• Installation
• Configuration
• Using Git Manager
• Backups
• Permissions
• Command line tools
• Upgrading
• Known limits
• Troubleshooting
• Contributing
• License
• Credits and history

Core use cases:

• No shell/SSH access to the server: manage git branches and deployments in the browser
• Hosting where only web or FTP access is available
• Teams that need a simple page to switch branches without knowing git's command line
• Site backups made and downloaded from the browser, without server access
• Encrypted offsite backups through a browser download

Features

Git Management (Web UI)

• Checkout local and remote branches — update your site to any git branch via browser
• Review the HEAD commit and the details of any commit
• Compare the checked out branch with its branch on a remote (the Upstream card) and fetch it with one button; each fetch is audited
• Browse the whole commit log page by page (10, 25, 50 or 100 per page), filtered by branch or tag, author, message text and date range; every page and filter is a link of its own
• Checkout specific commits by hash
• Manage remotes (add, change, remove, fetch) and push a branch to one, never forced
• Manage submodules (add, change, update, remove) and check out with submodules updated

Backup & Caption Manager (Web UI)

• Create timestamped backup captions (snapshots) of your site
• Four backup types (see below)
• Optional AES256 GPG encryption per backup
• AGPL-compatible sanitized SQL dumps — strips all private data for public sharing
• GPL v2 + AGPL v3 license files bundled in every caption archive for legal compliance
• Multi-select delete of old captions
• Age indicators (green/orange/red) showing how old each backup is
• A status taken from the newest backup — fresh, ageing (older than WarnAfterDays, 7), stale (older than StaleAfterDays, 30) or none, see "Backup Status and Age Warnings"
• Secure download of backup files via authenticated controller, streamed (archives of any size)
• Automatic cleanup of old captions based on MaxBackups setting

CLI Tools (requires shell access)

• backup-create.php — create backups from command line
• backup-list.php — list all captions with age indicators
• backup-info.php — show detail for a specific caption
• backup-delete.php — delete one or all captions
• remote.php — list, add, change, rename, remove, fetch and push remotes
• submodule.php — list, add, change, update and remove submodules
• upgrade-policy-dump-to-backup.php — rename the pre-2.0.4 git_manager/dump policies

Backup Types

Full Site Backup is the most complete option — it produces 3 separate archives covering everything needed to rebuild the site on a new server, excluding the Exponential kernel files (which come from git).

AGPL-Compatible Public Release Dumps

When creating any SQL-based backup (Full Site, DB + Files, or Database Only), you can check the 🔓 AGPL Compatible Release checkbox. This creates an additional sanitized SQL dump file alongside your normal backup, designed for public sharing or distribution to comply with AGPL/GPL license obligations.

What gets sanitized:

• User password hashes (bcrypt, MD5, SHA1/SHA256)
• Email addresses
• Google Analytics IDs (UA-, G-, GTM-, AW-)
• Stripe API keys (live/test secret/publishable)
• SendGrid and AWS API keys
• reCAPTCHA/hCaptcha site/secret keys
• Named settings (Password, ApiKey, AuthToken, WebhookSecret, SMTPPassword, etc.)
• Absolute disk paths (/var/www/, /home/, /srv/, etc.)
• Database credentials
• IP addresses in quoted strings
• SMTP credentials
• Complete removal of session, audit, pending actions, and notification tables

Result:

• Normal backup: sql_2026-06-21_12-00-00.tar.gz (full data, private)
• AGPL backup: sql_agpl_2026-06-21_12-00-00.tar.gz (sanitized, shareable)
• Marker file: agpl_compatible.txt (explains what was sanitized)
• Caption marked with: 🔓 AGPL COMPATIBLE badge in the UI

License Files Included: Every caption directory and compressed archive includes a licenses/ folder with:

• LICENSE-GPL-2.0.txt — GNU General Public License v2 (governs Exponential)
• LICENSE-GPL-2.0.md — Markdown-formatted GPL v2
• LICENSE-AGPL-3.0.txt — GNU Affero General Public License v3 (governs AGPL dumps)
• LICENSE-AGPL-3.0.md — Markdown-formatted AGPL v3
• README.txt — explains why these files are included

This ensures anyone receiving your backup archive has the full license terms as required by open source distribution obligations.

Backup Status and Age Warnings

The top of the Backup page says in one block how fresh the backups are. It is taken from the newest backup only: an old backup next to a recent one is no reason for a warning. (Before 2.0.15 the page took the age of the oldest backup, so it kept warning about a backup from months ago however recent the newest was.)

The thresholds are in git_manager.ini:

How the age is found:

• A backup's time is its folder name, Y-m-d_H-i-s, read in the installation's time zone (the one config.php sets; the names are written in that zone too). The folder's mtime is used only for a folder whose name is not such a date (made or renamed by hand), and the list says so. Copying, restoring or adding a file to a backup does not change its age.
• The backups are listed newest first, by that time, then by name.
• The age is the number of seconds between that time and now, shown in the largest whole unit (1 day, 22 days, 3 months, 1 year), singular and plural each with its own translatable text.
• A backup dated in the future does not count as the newest: a wrong clock or time zone must not hide that the real backups are old. The page names such backups in a note.

The texts are chosen from the state alone (GitManagerBackupMessages), the state from the ages (GitManagerBackupFreshness), and the backups are read from the disk by GitManagerBackupCatalogue. bin/php/backup-list.php prints the same status line.

Nothing makes backups on its own: the warning stays until someone creates a backup (on the page or with bin/php/backup-create.php, which a crontab can run; see below).

Best Practice: Create a full caption weekly, and a database-only caption before any CMS upgrades or major content changes.

Using the Backup Manager (Web)

1. Open Setup → Backup in the admin interface (/git_manager/backup; the address before 2.0.4, /git_manager/dump, redirects there)
2. Choose one of the four forms under Create a backup
3. Optionally add a description
4. Optionally check Encrypt the archives and enter a passphrase
5. Optionally check the AGPL compatible database dump to create a sanitized SQL dump for public sharing
6. Click the create button — the backup runs on the server; the page comes back with the result
7. In Existing backups, download each archive with its Download button (the AGPL compatible dumps too)
8. Remove a backup with its Remove button, or several with the check boxes and Remove selected

Every form is a POST with the form token of ezformtoken and ends in a redirect to the page, so reloading it repeats nothing; the result is shown once.

Downloads are streamed in pieces with the session closed, so an archive of several gigabytes needs no memory and does not block the user's other pages. A persistent PHP server (Exponential Velocity) keeps a whole response in memory before sending it; there an archive larger than PersistentServerDownloadLimitMB (git_manager.ini, default 128) is marked Too large for this server and refused with a message. Download it through the address served by Apache or PHP-FPM, or copy it from the server.

Tests: php ../../vendor/bin/phpunit in extension/git_manager (or phpunit -c phpunit.xml.dist in a checkout) runs the unit tests of the catalogue, the freshness and the texts. They need no database and make their throwaway backup folders under tests/.tmp (or GIT_MANAGER_TEST_TMP). Run them as the site user as well: two tests about unreadable backups are skipped as root.

Access

The backup page and the downloads need the policy git_manager/backup. Before 2.0.4 this function was called git_manager/dump; roles that grant the old name keep working, and

renames them.

Using the CLI Backup Tools

Run from the Exponential root directory (the folder that holds index.php and extension/):

List all backups:

Create backups:

Scheduled backups: nothing in git_manager makes backups on its own. A crontab line of the site's user makes them regularly, for example a database backup every night:

MaxBackups in git_manager.ini limits how many are kept (the oldest are removed after a full backup).

Inspect a caption:

Delete a caption:

Remotes and submodules (the same checks as the dashboard; git never waits for a password):

Decrypting GPG-Encrypted Backup Files

Encrypted backup files end in .tar.gz.gpg. To decrypt and extract:

Decrypt only (produces .tar.gz):

Decrypt and extract in one step:

Test decryption (verify passphrase works without extracting):

Only the person who created the backup knows the passphrase. There is no recovery mechanism — store your passphrase securely (e.g. in a password manager).

Requirements

• Exponential 6.x (the audit event of "Fetch now" needs the audit log of Exponential 6.0.15 or later)
• PHP 8.0 or later (tested up to PHP 8.5), with proc_open, exec and shell_exec allowed
• The git binary, runnable by the user the web server runs PHP as, and a git checkout of the site
• mysqldump (MySQL or MariaDB) for database backups
• GnuPG (gpg) for encrypted backups only
• tar and gzip for compressed backups
• Optional: the PHP posix extension (the Upstream card names the user the site runs as and, when PHP runs as root, fetches as the owner of the repository) and mbstring

Installation

With Composer

From the root of the Exponential installation:

The Exponential legacy installer places the package in extension/git_manager.

By hand

1. Download the latest release from https://github.com/se7enxweb/git_manager/releases (or git clone https://github.com/se7enxweb/git_manager.git).
2. Copy or move the folder to extension/git_manager in the installation. The folder name must be git_manager.

Activate it

Add the extension to settings/override/site.ini.append.php:

Then regenerate the autoloads and clear the caches, from the installation root:

Sign in to the administration: the Git tab now appears in the top menu, and Setup lists Git Manager and Backup. Give the roles that should use them the policies listed under Permissions (the Administrator role already has every function).

Configuration

All settings are in extension/git_manager/settings/git_manager.ini.append.php. Do not edit that file: override what you need in settings/override/git_manager.ini.append.php (or in a siteaccess). The defaults, with what each one does:

A typical override, for a site that deploys from the production branch of a remote called deploy and keeps ten backups:

The extension also adds itself to menu.ini (the Git tab and the Setup links), module.ini, design.ini (its design and its stylesheet), site.ini (its translations) and audit.ini (the audit event below). Nothing there needs changing.

Using Git Manager

The Git tab

The Git tab of the top menu opens the dashboard (/git_manager/dashboard). In the admin4 design the tab shows the git icon before its name. The same page is linked from Setup → Git Manager.

The dashboard has these cards:

1. HEAD: the checked out branch, the last commit and its date.
2. Upstream: the checked out branch against its branch on the remote of [UpstreamSettings]: the commits missing on either side, uncommitted files, links to the commits on the remote's web page, and Fetch now (git fetch --prune of that remote, nothing else). Every fetch is recorded in the audit log as system.git_manager.fetch.
3. Checkout: choose a local branch, or a branch of a remote, and check it out. This is how a site is deployed: push the work to a branch, then check that branch out here.
4. Commit: check out one commit by its hash, for example to go back to a known good state.
5. Remotes: list, add, change and remove remotes, fetch one, and push a branch to one (never forced). Needs the remotes and push functions.
6. Submodules: list, add, change, update and remove submodules, and check out with submodules updated. Adding, changing and removing stage the change; commit it to keep it. Needs the submodules function.
7. Log: the commit history page by page (10, 25, 50 or 100 per page), filtered by branch or tag, author, message text and dates. Each commit links to its details (/git_manager/commit_details/<hash>).

The log's page and filters are view parameters, so a filtered view is a link you can share or bookmark:

Every value reaches git as an argument of its own, without a shell, after a check: a branch or tag must be one of the repository's refs, dates must be real days, texts are cut at 200 characters.

The Backup page

Setup → Backup (/git_manager/backup) makes, lists, downloads and removes backups; see Using the Backup Manager (Web) above.

Permissions

The module git_manager has these functions. Give them in User accounts → Roles and policies.

Checking out a branch changes the code the site runs. Give these functions only to people who may deploy.

Upgrading

1. Replace the extension's folder with the new release (composer update se7enxweb/git_manager, or copy the new files over the old ones).

2. Regenerate the autoloads and clear the caches:

3. Read doc/CHANGELOG.md for what changed. From a version before 2.0.4, run bin/php/upgrade-policy-dump-to-backup.php once (see Access).

Known limits

• Git Manager runs git as the user PHP runs as. That user needs read and write access to the checkout (including .git), and the SSH keys or credentials of the remotes. A remote that asks for a password fails rather than waits.
• Backups and fetches run inside the web request. A very large database or var/ folder can take longer than the web server's timeout; use bin/php/backup-create.php from a shell or a crontab for those.
• Database backups support MySQL and MariaDB (mysqldump). Other database engines are not backed up.
• A persistent PHP server keeps a whole download in memory, so large archives are refused there (PersistentServerDownloadLimitMB); Apache or PHP-FPM stream them.
• Git Manager does not pull, merge or rebase, and it never forces a push.

Troubleshooting

• The Git tab is missing. Check that ActiveExtensions[]=git_manager is set, clear the caches, and give your role git_manager/git_manager.
• The tab has no icon. Icons are drawn by the admin4 design; older admin designs show the name only.
• "Fetch now" fails with a permission or host key error. The user PHP runs as cannot reach the remote over SSH. Add a key for that user, set HttpsFallback=enabled for a public GitHub repository, or change the remote's address to HTTPS.
• A checkout fails because of local changes. Git refuses to overwrite uncommitted changes. The Upstream card shows how many there are; commit or remove them from a shell first.
• The database backup is empty or fails. Check that mysqldump is installed and in the PATH of the web server, and adapt MySQLDumpCommand if your server needs other options.
• An encrypted backup cannot be opened. See Decrypting GPG-Encrypted Backup Files; without the passphrase there is no way back.
• "Too large for this server" on a download. Download through Apache or PHP-FPM, or raise PersistentServerDownloadLimitMB.

Questions and bug reports: https://github.com/se7enxweb/git_manager/issues

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome at https://github.com/se7enxweb/git_manager. The unit tests need no database:

Translations live in translations/<locale>/translation.ts; the extension ships English, German, Spanish (Spain and Mexico), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish and Klingon. New languages are welcome.

License

Git Manager is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License or (at your option) any later version. See LICENSE. It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.

The backup archives carry copies of the GPL v2 and the AGPL v3 (see AGPL-Compatible Public Release Dumps); their texts are in doc/.

Credits and history

Serhey Dolgushev wrote Git Manager in 2013 as an extension for eZ Publish, the content management system that preceded Exponential, to switch a site's branch from its administration. 7x has maintained it since, for Exponential: backups and encryption, the AGPL compatible dumps, the Upstream card, remotes and submodules, the paged log, the audit event, the admin4 design and the translations.

• Copyright (C) 2013 - 2014 Serhey Dolgushev
• Copyright (C) 1998 - 2026 7x

See doc/COPYRIGHT.md.