Read-only guarantee

Reviewed repos are never modified. Local Review never fetches, checks out, commits, stashes, rebases or resets. It reads your repos the way git log does, so you can point it at a working checkout mid-task, with uncommitted changes, and nothing about the repo, its index or its branches changes.

How it’s enforced

All git access goes through one module, server/git.ts, which:

• runs git -C <repo> … via execFile with no shell, so paths and refs can’t inject commands;
• refuses any subcommand outside a read-only allow-list: log, show, diff, diff-tree, rev-list, rev-parse, merge-base, patch-id, cat-file, ls-tree, for-each-ref;
• refuses options that write files or run programs (--output, --no-index, --ext-diff, --textconv, …);
• only uses object-level commands: diffs are always commit-to-commit (git diff <parent> <sha>), never against the work tree or index, and git status is never run;
• passes --no-optional-locks and sets GIT_OPTIONAL_LOCKS=0, so git never takes index locks or refreshes the index; drops any inherited GIT_* environment (e.g. GIT_DIR); and disables textconv, external diff drivers and signature checking;
• only passes refs from project.yaml (checked: no leading -, no .., and after --end-of-options) and full 40-hex shas that git itself returned. A landed PR’s shas from its prs file are used only after git rev-parse --verify <sha>^{commit} has returned them.

Paths and names

• Shas in URLs must be hex, and are only used after matching them against the repo’s own commit list.
• Project and repo names are restricted to [A-Za-z0-9._-] with no leading dot, and must exist in the config.
• Review and PR file names are restricted to <40-hex>.yaml.

So no request can name a path outside ~/.local-review/projects/.

What does change the repo

Only your agent, in its own work: fixups, rebases, branches, pushes. Local Review shows the result, and never does any of it itself. It never talks to GitHub either.

Contributors: new git calls go through server/git.ts too, using only subcommands on the list. A change that weakens this won’t be merged (see Contributing).