An extension to verify proper preservation of git history

Pitch

Let A and B be repositories. Say you are merging A into B, and you want to preserve git history of B after its been merged in (with some non-squashing, merging git command). There are about 10,235 commits in A, its rather troubling to cross reference that many commits. Is there a better way to confirm that I've preserved the entire history of A in B?

Introducing Git Subtree Audit 🌲

git-subtree-audit is a lightweight Git extension that verifies subtree merges automatically. Instead of manually counting or scanning thousands of commits, it codifies invariants about history preservation into a single CLI command.

Exact verification: Ensures every commit from repo A exists in repo B’s subtree history.

Why this matters

Confidence: No need to trust manual inspection — the tool guarantees no history is lost.

Productivity: Reduce merge review time from hours (or days) to seconds.

Reliability: Especially critical when merging SDKs, shared libraries, or repos with sensitive audit requirements.

Installation

Option 1: Download Pre-built Binary (Recommended)

Download the latest release from GitHub Releases.

macOS (Apple Silicon M1/M2/M3)

curl -L https://github.com/yanxue06/git-subtree-audit/releases/latest/download/git-subtree-audit-macos-arm64 -o git-subtree-audit
chmod +x git-subtree-audit
sudo mv git-subtree-audit /usr/local/bin/

macOS (Intel)

curl -L https://github.com/yanxue06/git-subtree-audit/releases/latest/download/git-subtree-audit-macos-x86_64 -o git-subtree-audit
chmod +x git-subtree-audit
sudo mv git-subtree-audit /usr/local/bin/

Linux

curl -L https://github.com/yanxue06/git-subtree-audit/releases/latest/download/git-subtree-audit-linux-x86_64 -o git-subtree-audit
chmod +x git-subtree-audit
sudo mv git-subtree-audit /usr/local/bin/

Windows

Download from: https://github.com/yanxue06/git-subtree-audit/releases/latest/download/git-subtree-audit-windows-x86_64.exe
# Save to a folder in your PATH, or add the folder to PATH

Option 2: Install from Cargo

cargo install --git https://github.com/yanxue06/git-subtree-audit

Usage

Just point it to your source repo, target repo, and the subtree path — the tool handles the rest.

For examples, if you have a repo A and a repo B and:

repo A is the path of source repo you want to merge repo B is the target repo that contains a subtree copy of A. sdk/ → the path inside Repo B where Repo A was merged.

In the root of repo B, run git subtree-audit <github-url-of-repo-A> . <path-to-merged-in-repo-relative-to-root>

In this case <path-to-merged-in-repo-relative-to-root> would just be sdk