josh

Josh solves a specific monorepo headache: working with one folder of a giant repository as if it were its own small repo, full Git history and all, without cloning the entire thing. If your company keeps everything in one massive monorepo but a team only cares about one corner of it, Josh projects that corner out as a standalone repo they can clone, commit to, and push back. MIT licensed and free.

The core piece is josh-proxy, an HTTP and SSH Git proxy that transforms history on the fly and shares a cache across everyone hitting it. There is also a local CLI for the same projections, reusable filter and workspace configs you version like code, and a GraphQL API so build systems can query repo state without checking anything out. It is written in Rust, which shows in how it handles large histories.

This is infrastructure for organizations that have already committed to a monorepo and hit the wall: slow clones, access boundaries, CI that rebuilds the world. Solo developers and small teams almost certainly do not need it. The teams that do tend to know exactly why. Standing up josh-proxy and writing good filters is real work, not a weekend setup.

The catch is that Josh is powerful precisely because it sits between developers and Git, which means it is one more piece of infrastructure to run, monitor, and keep available. When the proxy is down, the projections are down. Treat it like the production service it becomes.