This library isn't really maintained anymore. You should use SwiftGit2 instead.

Gift provides Swift bindings to the libgit2 library.

That means you can clone a Git repository, list its commits, or even make a commit of your own--all from within your Swift program.

For example, we can grab the latest commit message of this repository:

let url = NSURL(fileURLWithPath: "/Users/modocache/Gift")!
let latestCommitMessage = openRepository(url)
  .flatMap { $0.headReference }
  .flatMap { $0.commit }
  .flatMap { $0.message }

Gift returns result objects for any operation that might fail. The type of lastCommitMessage above is Result<String, NSError>. If every operation succeeded, you can access the commit message String. But if any of the operations failed, you'll have an NSError that describes what went wrong.

You can list all branches in a repository. Gift uses ReactiveCocoa to represent a sequence of values:

repository.branches().start(next: { (reference) in
  println("Branch name: \(reference.name)")
})

You can list commits as well:

repository.commits().start { (commit) in
  println("Commit message: \(commit.message)")
}

You can order the commits as you please, of course:

let commits = repository.commits(sorting: CommitSorting.Time | CommitSorting.Reverse)

You can make a commit, too:

let tree = repository.index        // Grab the index for the repository
  .flatMap { $0.add() }            // Add any modified entries to that index
  .flatMap { $0.writeTree() }      // Grab a tree representing the changeset
  .flatMap { $0.commit("Zing!") }  // Commit

Swift allows Gift to provide default parameters. If you want to use the default behavior, you can easily clone a remote repository:

let remoteURL = NSURL(string: "git://git.libssh2.org/libssh2.git")!
let destinationURL = NSURL(fileURLWithPath: "/Users/modocache/libssh2")!
let repository = cloneRepository(remoteURL, destinationURL)

But you can also customize that behavior and have Gift issue download progress updates:

let options = CloneOptions(
  checkoutOptions: CheckoutOptions(
    strategy: CheckoutStrategy.SafeCreate,
    progressCallback: { (path, completedSteps, totalSteps) in
      // ...do something with checkout progress.
    }
  ),
  remoteCallbacks: RemoteCallbacks(
    transportMessageCallback: { (message) in
      // ...do something with messages from remote, like "Compressing objects: 1% (47/4619)"
    },
    transferProgressCallback: { (progress) in
      // ...do something with progress (bytes received, etc.) updates.
    })
)
let repository = cloneRepository(remoteURL, destinationURL, options: options)

ObjectiveGit is the official set of Objective-C bindings to Git. It is maintained by the same people who develop GitHub for Mac, so you can be sure it's solid. And you can use it from Swift!

If, however, you're willing to tolerate a less stable set of bindings, Gift utilizes features of Swift to make certain aspects of interfacing with libgit2 easy. For example, take the following code, which prints the latest commit message in a repository:

let latestCommitMessage = openRepository(url)
  .flatMap { $0.headReference }
  .flatMap { $0.commit }
  .flatMap { $0.message }
println(latestCommitMessage) // Either prints commit or error

Because most Gift functions return Result objects, and because you can chain those Result objects, Gift makes it easy to display precise error information. To get an equivalent level of error handling in ObjectiveGit, you'd need to write the following:

NSError *repositoryError = nil;
GTRepository *repository = [GTRepository repositoryWithURL:url error:&error];
if (repositoryError != nil) {
  NSLog(@"An error occurred: %@", repositoryError);
  return;
}

NSError *headReferenceError = nil;
GTReference *headReference = [repository headReferenceWithError:&headReferenceError];
if (headReferenceError != nil) {
  NSLog(@"An error occurred: %@", headReferenceError);
  return;
}

NSError *lookupError = nil;
GTCommit *commit = [repository lookupObjectByOID:headReference.OID
                                      objectType:GTObjectTypeCommit
                                           error:&lookupError];
if (lookupError != nil) {
  NSLog(@"An error occurred: %@", lookupError);
  return;
}

NSString *message = commit.message;
if (message == nil) {
  NSLog(@"An error occurred");
} else {
  NSLog(@"Commit message: %@", message);
}

As you can see, Gift requires significantly less code. ObjectiveGit is, however, far more mature. It's up to you to decide which is right for your project.

You'll need to have homebrew installed. If you don't already have CMake installed, run:

$ brew install cmake

Then, to build the dependencies for Gift, just run:

$ rake dependencies build

If it's your first time running the script, it'll take a while--it needs to build static libraries for OpenSSL, libssh2, and libgit2. And that's for both OS X and iOS.

You can test your changes by running:

$ rake

If you see a non-descript error like "Cannot build module Gift", there's an extremely sophisticated workaround: first, remove all the source files from the main and test target you're trying to build.

Then, build the framework. It should work fine (magic, I know). Now that it builds, revert the removal of the files by running git checkout -- Gift.xcodeproj. And voila! Now everything builds fine.

You can find an example iOS app that uses Gift in the Examples directory. Using Gift is (sort of) easy:

1. Drag Gift.xcodeproj, LlamaKit.xcodeproj, Quick.xcodeproj, and Nimble.xcodeproj into your app's workspace.
2. In the "Link Binary with Libraries" build phase of your app, link your app to Gift.framework.
3. Set the “Header Search Paths” (HEADER_SEARCH_PATHS) build setting to the correct path for the libgit2 headers in your project. For example, if you added the submodule to your project as External/Gift, you would set this build setting to External/Gift/External/libgit2/include.
4. import Gift in any Swift file, and you're off to the races!