Exporting a database with change history to a git repo

[fangq]

I am trying to convert a couchdb database to a git repository, storing the version histories of each document, ideally with the commit time (or chronical order) matching those made in the database - so that if I run it again, it exactly reproduces the repository. I found two difficulties

1. the _changes API does not list all changes; if a document has multiple revisions, only the update to the last revision is shown in the _changes output.
2. there is no timestamp for each change

I wrote the following bash script for this conversion

https://github.com/NeuroJSON/neuroj/blob/main/bin/couch2git

it wasn't able to solve the above two issues, despite that it can produce something close. if a document has multiple revisions, I have to use rev_info=true to query all revisions and add those older revisions sequentially - however, this breaks the chronical order between changes made between documents - if changes were made in doc1-v1, doc2-v1, doc1-v2 order, my git commit will have doc1-v1, doc1-v2, doc2-v1 instead. It also does not have the timestamp when the commit was made.

I am wondering if either the complete change history, or the update time is available in couchdb? I recently started using the updates handler to manually add creation time and update time, but most existing docs do not have these added fields.

any comment on how to get such information would be appreciated!

[janl]

Heya, there is no facility in CouchDB, including the _changes feed that guarantees you see each revision of each doc, so any solution has the possibility of missing revisions.

[rnewson]

As Jan has said, CouchDB does not store the full history of documents (and never has). Nor does it add any data (such as a timestamp) other than what you added yourself. You can certainly build an application on top of CouchDB that does both, though.