This is by design, as git is useful for more than just diff checking, (e.g. for maintaining the cache), and most CI systems are have got available for cloning the project they are building. Not planning on changing this, but happy to look at a PR.

I hope you might reconsider, if you are using a multi-stage Dockerfile for testing, requiring git to work properly means the entire layer is uncachable since you have to copy the ./.git directory which changes on each commit regardless if any files have actually changed.

Fair enough, I'll have a think

I agree with @davidbarratt that multi-stage Dockerfile's are very common in CI. Requiring .git essentially rules out this tool for anyone using that workflow.

I haven't looked at this library close enough yet to understand how difficult it will be to remove the requirement but if you have any ideas I am happy to try and help contribute to a fix.

This is an issue for us as well, our CI uses docker and doesn't copy over the .git folder.

Just ran into this issue as well, and git is just used to list files, so git init && git add . && git commit -m dummy works as a workaround, but it's ugly, and the dependency on git should just be removed or have a flag to toggle off.

Almost done with v6 so thinking about the future of this, and I guess most of what Betterer uses git for could be replaced by traversing the file structure and then respecting a .gitignore file if it is present?