New answer
GitLab almost certainly uses bare repositories on the server. If you want to modify the contents of your repository directly on your server you can try cloning a copy to the local filesystem and working on it there.
Note that your repo is quite large and there are known performance issues on large repos. See
- http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/Git-performance-results-on-a-large-repository-td7250867.html
- https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/large_repositories/
- https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/big-repositories
- https://github.com/Microsoft/VFSForGit
Original answer follows.
GitLab includes a basic online IDE.
I encourage you to read that whole page, but you can get started by clicking on the Web IDE button that's displayed when you're looking at a file or a folder. Editing and committing is fairly intuitive.
Having said that, for anything beyond fixing typos I still recommend cloning the repository to a development machine and working there. A proper IDE gives more features, lets you run your tests before committing, and lets you commit multiple changed files at once as a logical, atomic commit.
Thank you for your answer! Unfortunately my question was misleading. I know about the IDE, but I was looking for a way to directly manipulate the repository on the server (via SSH) since my script has to modify a few thousand commits.
@DanielStephens, thanks for clarifying. I've updated your question accordingly. I don't have a GitLab server handy to check, but the vast majority of Git servers use bare repositories (essentially just the contents of the repo's
.git/directory) so there isn't a working copy of the files it contains. I guess you could create a clone on the server's filesystem and work there, but that would use up a bunch of extra disk space. Can you add more detail about what your script does?Thank you very much!! As mentioned, I am converting a Perforce depot to a git repo. And that takes really a long time. So I converted and commited 50% of the converted repo so far. And I thought why not continuing converting it right on the server. It saves an indirection and disk space. We talk about days of conversions here :-(
I think the links and feedback answers my questions! Thanks again!
Glad to help. I've updated my answer to incorporate updates from our conversation.