Written by Jamie Tanna
on April 11, 2026
CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 Apache-2.0
3 mins

Something I've been meaning to write about since November 2024 is how to create an external command for diffing between files with git diff.

I found that while I was implementing renovate-packagedata-diff that there seemed to be a lack of documentation around how to do it, so it would be worthwhile me blogging about it.

(I've since found that there is some documentation in the Git Diffs man page, but it wasn't exactly well discoverable)

It's been at the back of my mind as a TODO for some time, and then I was nudged about it fairly recently by Andrew Nesbitt's good post on Git Diff Drivers, and this week looking at diffing OpenAPI specs with oasdiff.

I thought I'd use this as an opportunity for blogging about how this works, as well as adding a separate for oasdiff as a diff driver.

Note that this is a case where we want to expose more information in our output, and can't rely on the textconv method to convert a (binary) file to a more diff-able textual format.

In a lot of cases, using textconv is likely sufficient!

What arguments do we need to handle?

Although many tools would work out-of-the-box if they expect to be run as tool [before] [after], git diff passes 7 arguments to the external tool it's calling.

Although surprising, this does provide some richer data that is useful to have.

To give a more "worked example", let's look at what this looks like for updating an existing file, or adding/deleting a file:

# newlines added for readability purpose only

# when an existing file is updated
renovate-packagedata-diff
  renovate/github-co-cddo-api-catalogue.json             # 1: filename in the repo
  /tmp/git-blob-shryRa/github-co-cddo-api-catalogue.json # 2: "before"
  f0a1311ae439fff36f994a3be5d5a7eb7d7a34dc               # 3: SHA-1 hash of the "before" file
  100644                                                 # 4: octal mode of the "before" file
  /tmp/git-blob-y2mrZp/github-co-cddo-api-catalogue.json # 5: "after"
  e39975894a72f706e6a59bccf31120ffaa219ff3               # 6: SHA-1 hash of the "after" file
  100644                                                 # 7: octal mode of the "after" file

# when a net-new file is created
renovate-packagedata-diff
  renovate/github-co-cddo-api-catalogue.json             # 1: filename in the repo
  /dev/null                                              # 2: "before"
  .                                                      # 3: SHA-1 hash of the "before" file
  .                                                      # 4: octal mode of the "before" file
  /tmp/git-blob-iAbnMD/github-co-cddo-api-catalogue.json # 5: "after"
  5c55e5b99b21db68c360419d44dac906c336bec6               # 6: SHA-1 hash of the "after" file
  100644                                                 # 7: octal mode of the "after" file

# when a file is deleted
renovate-packagedata-diff
  renovate/github-co-cddo-api-catalogue.json             # 1: filename in the repo
  /tmp/git-blob-aBldZ4/github-co-cddo-api-catalogue.json # 2: "before"
  6b24e38aa4aac8e00e44ab68e156744138ef6afc               # 3: SHA-1 hash of the "before" file
  100644                                                 # 4: octal mode of the "before" file
  /dev/null                                              # 5: "after"
  .                                                      # 6: SHA-1 hash of the "after" file
  .                                                      # 7: octal mode of the "after" file

Note that /dev/null is used when a file was created/deleted, and that arguments that aren't relevant in these cases are provided as a ..

It can also be useful to see if the environment variable GIT_PAGER_IN_USE is set, if you'd like your command to be able to handle regular arguments and the git diff arguments.

Example with oasdiff

As noted in my separate post about this, with this information it's straightforward to write a lightweight wrapped script around the oasdiff tool for comparing OpenAPI specs.

For instance, the most basic implementation we can add is:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Via https://www.jvt.me/posts/2026/04/11/oasdiff-driver/
# A diff driver for `git diff` to provide a human-readable changelog for a given OpenAPI spec

if [[ "$2" == "/dev/null" ]]; then
	echo "$1 was added"
	exit 0
elif [[ "$5" == "/dev/null" ]]; then
	echo "$1 was deleted"
	exit 0
fi

# I prefer to have colour always reported
oasdiff changelog "$2" "$5" --color always

This doesn't handle any changes in permissions - which may be useful to report - and it may be worth using the SHA-1 checksums of the files to cache the resulting diffs.