gitforge

gitforge is a Git MCP (Model Context Protocol) server written in Rust. It bridges AI assistants to Git repositories by exposing version control operations as MCP tools and resources.

Why

AI assistants need controlled access to Git repositories — reading status, history, diffs, and making commits. gitforge runs as a local stdio server that the AI client launches as a subprocess, giving it narrow, audit-able Git access without exposing the full shell.

Features

• 13 MCP tools: ping, git_status, git_log, git_branches, git_diff, git_diff_unstaged, git_diff_staged, git_show, git_commit, git_add, git_branch_create, git_checkout, git_merge
• 2 MCP resources: git://HEAD and git://status
• Flag-injection defense: tool arguments starting with - are rejected before reaching the git layer
• Tool annotations: read-only/destructive/mutable hints for client UI
• MCP Roots discovery: detects repositories managed by the client
• Actor-based Git access: git2::Repository runs on its own thread (required because git2::Repository is !Send)
• Line-delimited JSON-RPC 2.0 over stdin/stdout
• Thread-safe logger with 7 levels, ANSI color, optional timestamps and source-location (feature-gated), JSON output format, and env-var level override
• 18 integration tests covering all tools, resources, and error paths

Install

cargo install --path .

Builds on any platform Rust supports (tested on macOS).

Quickstart

# Start the server for the current repo
gitforge

# Test with a JSON-RPC request:
echo '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"ping"}' | gitforge --repo .

In practice, the AI client (Claude Code, etc.) launches gitforge as a subprocess and communicates over its stdin/stdout automatically.

Basic usage

gitforge                              # default log level: warn
gitforge --repo /path/to/repo -l debug # verbose logging
gitforge --log-file /tmp/gitforge.log  # log to file
gitforge --log-format json             # machine-parseable logs
gitforge --allowed-repo /path/to/repo  # restrict operations to this tree

CLI options

Argument	Description
--repo [PATH]	Repo path (default ., or GITFORGE_REPO env var)
--allowed-repo [PATH]	Restrict operations to this tree (defaults to --repo)
--log-file [PATH]	Log file path (default: stderr)
-l, --log-level	Min level: off, fatal, error, warn, info, debug, trace
--log-format	Output format: pretty (default) or json

Log level can also be set via the GITFORGE_LOG_LEVEL environment variable, which takes precedence over the CLI flag.

Build

cargo build              # debug build
cargo build --release    # release build
cargo check              # fast type-check only
cargo fmt                # formats with hard_tabs, tab_spaces=4
cargo test --features "show_time_stamp,show_source_location"

Rust edition 2024. Cargo.lock is committed for binary reproducibility.

License

MIT — see LICENSE

Contributing

See DEV.md for contributor guidance and DEV_IN_DEPTH.md for the full source walkthrough.