serving git with both "git:" and "http:" and submodules

I have a public tree that I maintain for users. The tree is consisted of a main-tree and a submodule tree which is also served from the same server.

The main tree: git://my-domain.org/my-tree/.git The sub-tree: git://my-domain.org/my-tree/sub/.git

in my .gitmodule I have the usual
[submodule "sub"]
        url = git://my-domain.org/my-tree/sub/.git

So smart people using git will just do:
1. $ git clone git://my-domain.org/my-tree/.git
2. $ git submodule init
3. $ git submodule update

And all is well... But smart ass corporate people would not use "git:"
protocol because of fire-walls and for them I have a dumb "http:" export
as:
1. $ git clone http://my-domain.org/trees/my-tree/.git

With them, step 3 above will not work. My current instructions
for them is that after the step 2 "git submodule init" they should
manually edit my-tree/.git/config and change to:
[submodule "sub"]
-        url = git://my-domain.org/my-tree/sub/.git
+        url = http://my-domain.org/trees/my-tree/sub/.git

And then do step 3 to clone the sub-module.

So my question is: Can I automate this so people with "http:" clones are not forced to manually edit their config files? (Some users are just not up to it)

Thanks, (Sorry if that has been raised before. Couldn't find any.) Boaz

Boaz Harrosh wrote:

[...]

Sure. For example, you can ship an update-submodules.sh script to take care of checking “git config remote.origin.url” and updating the ‘[submodule "sub"] url’ configuration to match.

Of course, even this would not make 'git clone --recursive http://my-domain.org/trees/my-tree/.git' work. If you can get git-http-backend working, I’d suggest using that so you only have to deal with one url.

Hope that helps, Jonathan

On 07/14/2010 06:39 PM, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

Right

Ok I'll dive into "git-http-backend" (any pointers). But I thought this one will still serve me an "http:" url. Are you suggesting to just drop the "git:" protocol? (Since "git-http-backend" is just as good, through http?)

But a script for users might be a very good idea. I might even add it to the main Makefile. And make it totally transparent. $ git-clone; make;

Thanks that actually helped Boaz

Boaz Harrosh wrote:

The reference manual[1] is all I know of. Googling reveals a nice overview[2] by Scott Chacon.

Exactly[3].

Glad to be useful. :)

Good luck, Jonathan

[1] http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-http-backend.html [2] http://progit.org/2010/03/04/smart-http.html [3] Well, the protocol overhead is a little higher, but that is nothing compared to the difference between git: and traditional static http:.

On 07/14/2010 11:39 AM, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

Almost.

Firewall-ed users can just run

$ git config --global url.http://my-domain.org/.insteadOf git://my-domain.org/

*once* per user per machine, or even

$ git config --global url.http.insteadOf git

if they want to be really aggressive. After that they can just pretend to use the git protocol and all URLs will be mapped under the hood:

  git clone --recursive git://my-domain.org/...

-Brad

Boaz Harrosh:

You should be able to use a relative URL in .gitmodules, something like this should work:

[submodule "sub"]
        url = ../sub/.git

There is already excellent documentation for this facility in git-submodule.1, but it is not so discoverable.

Relative paths in .gitmodules can be useful for serving the same repository over multiple protocols, for example. Thanks to Peter for pointing this out.

Cc: Peter Krefting <peter@softwolves.pp.se>
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
---
 Documentation/gitmodules.txt |    3 +++
 1 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

The url, path, and update items in [submodule "foo"] stanzas are nicely explained in the .gitmodules and ‘git submodule’ documentation. Point there from the config documentation.

Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
---
It’s late, so I don’t trust this to be coherent English necessarily.
Thoughts and improvements welcome.

 Documentation/config.txt |    9 +++++++++
 1 files changed, 9 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

On Thursday 15 July 2010, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

Acked-by: Johan Herland <johan@herland.net>

May be more legible with:

  The path within this project, the URL, and the updating strategy...

...Johan

Johan Herland wrote:

Thanks, Johan.  I’ve pushed both patches out to
  git://repo.or.cz/git/jrn.git submodule-doc
including that change.

Jonathan Nieder (2):
      gitmodules.5: url can be a relative path
      Documentation: add submodule.* to the big configuration variable list

 Documentation/config.txt     |    9 +++++++++
 Documentation/gitmodules.txt |    3 +++
 2 files changed, 12 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

On Thursday 15 July 2010, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

Acked-by: Johan Herland <johan@herland.net>

On 07/15/2010 10:41 AM, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

You guys rock. It's exactly what the doctor ordered

Thanks Boaz