Private shared git repositories on the cheap
Tom Allen
You can push your local repo to your Dropbox, and it automatically gets synced with all the PCs you are using Dropbox with. You can then share this Dropbox folder with other developers.
# go to your Dropbox and create your project directory
$ cd ~/Dropbox
$ mkdir my_project
$ cd my_project# now initialize your git repo with
$ git --bare init# As you have your remote-repo prepared, go to your local repository.
$ cd ~/dev/my_project# First, you need to introduce the remote location to git
# this adds the specified path as the remote named 'origin'
# but you could as well name it 'Dropbox' or 'whatever'
$ git remote add origin file:///home/user/Dropbox/git/my_project# git is set up, so push it to the remote ( 'origin' or whatever
# name you have used ).
$ git push origin masterDone, you know have your repo on your Dropbox. If you are on another PC and want to access it, just clone it from there, and you are set. You can use this like you would use any git-server.
Billy Huang
Andrew Hill
Tom Allen
Matthew Fernandez
things like your SSH connection unexpectedly hanging up in the middle
of a push. The final thing the push writes should be analogous to
committing a database transaction. So if Dropbox syncs part way
through, you should just get a partial commit that Git will notice and
automatically discard (on garbage collection). Of course, Mercurial is
a whole different kettle of fish.
Something I would be more concerned about is the following scenario:
1. Alice commits to her working directory and pushes (to the Dropbox remote).
2. Bob commits to his working directory and pushes (to the Dropbox remote).
3. Bob's Dropbox folder syncs.
4. Alice's Dropbox folder syncs *CHAOS?*
How does Dropbox resolve conflicts? I really, really don't want to
resolve a merge conflict inside my remote...
Andrew Hill
Matthew Fernandez
> Hanging up an SSH connection is quite different to files being present and
> accessible, but out of date — git will surely exit if a file isn't found,
> but if it's there but out of sync with the rest of the repo, it's much the
> same as your conflict example.
situation I was imagining was where the SSH connection drops halfway
through after git's already written some files. In fact it may even
have open file handles when the connection drops. In this case you'll
end up with part of a commit in your remote, but git should resolve
this.
> When DropBox has conflicts (e.g. you had a file open while it was deleted,
> or two people edited a file and tried to sync), it renames files, appending
> a reason for the renaming (e.g. "deleted" or "conflict" and a hash) so you
> could get
> a) just Alice's files (if she synced first) + bob's put in there with funny
> names — at least shouldn't break it
> b) just Bob's files (if he synced first) + alice's put in there with funny
> names — also shouldn't break it
> c) a mix of the two! (under race conditions) — watch out for sharks
I think a and b will still break. Git will think the commit succeeded
and dropbox will automatically resolve the conflicts this way. The
next time git is invoked on the remote it will probably see part of
one commit and part of the other in a way that it cannot resolve. Of
course you can probably force repair the remote and then push again,
but you may end up in the same situation.
The underlying problem here is that you never want dropbox to resolve
conflicts. Can you force a dropbox sync? In this case, add a git push
hook in your remote to sync with dropbox before and after pushing.
That way git will stop the push and force you to merge/rebase if there
are conflicts. There's still a race condition where the pre-hook can
see no changes and the post-hook can see changes. It's unlikely, but
"unlikely" in software development usually means a problem you never
hit until an hour before the release deadline.
David Wood
As far as I've ever found there is no way to tell dropbox what to do or when to do it. The whole innovation behind dropbox is that it's a versioning repo for idiots, all the actual tech is hidden from the end user.
That said, if anyone does know a way of forcing a synch other than logging out/in please let me know, that'd be really handy.
-DKW
Matthew Fernandez
> As far as I've ever found there is no way to tell dropbox what to do or when
> to do it. The whole innovation behind dropbox is that it's a versioning repo
> for idiots, all the actual tech is hidden from the end user.
they even give you instructions for pulling your files out of the
cache! https://www.dropbox.com/help/11
Matthew Fernandez
solutions people are using for syncing. Like most of us, I have
several computers/devices that I use regularly and I like having my
settings, apps and some data available everywhere. I don't like using
a service like Dropbox because I don't want to rely on their
benevolence to store and not expose or censor my files. As a result I
have a collection of shell scripts in my crontab that do various
syncing operations with git/hg repos living on my own servers. What
are other people using for this? Dropbox, SparkleShare, something
homebrewed or something else?
Julian G
Also, Bitbucket has free private git hosting. I've moved over to them for my projects instead of my Gitorious server.
I use DropBox and Git. SugarSync is a rival to DropBox, and there are many other open source (and non cloud) alternatives to DropBox.
J