threads / discuss / 37147

Syncing Git Repositories

Subject: Syncing Git Repositories

## tl;dr

3 messages between Jul 17, 2014 and Jul 17, 2014.

replies: 2people: 3as markdown or json

Sajan Parikh· Jul 17, 2014, 02:26 UTC · lore

On all my laptops and desktops, I have a directory at /home/sajan/Code where all my active projects and repositories live.

/home/sajan/Code/repository1 /home/sajan/Code/repository2 /home/sajan/Code/repository3

...etc...

Up until now I've relied on pushing and pulling to and from my Gitlab server to keep my projects in sync across all my laptops and desktops. It's worked great.

However, today I decided to add my code folder to my ownCloud server and sync it across all my laptops and desktops the same way I do for /home/sajan/Documents, /home/sajan/Music, and a few application config directories to keep all my devices in sync.

By syncing my code folder and git repositories in this way, do I risk borking any repositories? I'm 99% confident I'm not, since everything is in .git/, and there are not external databases or log files that need to be updated. Just making sure though.

I'm only doing this because sometimes I forget to pull changes down from my Gitlab server on a different laptop or desktop and start making local changes. Which is fine, I can merge easily, but if everything were sync'd automatically when I logged into my computer it would be great.

Another option I thought of would be to write a bash script that executed at login and went into each of my repositories and ran git pull, but I decided against this because of legitimate non-fast-forward merges.

TLDR;

If I sync my repositories across computers using something similar to Dropbox, rather than pushing/pulling to and from an central repository, am I risking borking any respository?

-- 
Sajan Parikh

Matthieu Moy· Jul 17, 2014, 06:53 UTC · re: Sajan Parikh · lore

Re: Syncing Git Repositories

Sajan Parikh <sajan@parikh.io> writes:

> By syncing my code folder and git repositories in this way, do I risk
> borking any repositories?  I'm 99% confident I'm not, since everything
> is in .git/, and there are not external databases or log files that
> need to be updated.  Just making sure though.

You're right that there are no external database, hence if you actually sync the whole worktree+.git/, you won't have any problem.

I synchonize a bunch of Git repositories between machines with Unison (file transfer utility), it works great.

One issue you may encounter is if you have either partial synchronization (e.g. network loss in the middle of a synchronization, I don't know how owncloud deals with it), or two way synchronization (there's a synchronization between your laptop and owncloud ongoing, and you start working on your desktop and trigger a synchronization.

I sometimes encounter this situation with unison. The good news is that in 99,999% of cases where I'd encounter a problem, Unison shows a conflict on the index file (modified on both sides). So, in these cases, I just use Git normally to synchronize, decide that one side becomes the reference, and rsync to the other to resolve the Unison conflict.

Also, you have to ensure that you synchronize both file additions/modifications, and file deletions. I often make the mistake of using rsync without --delete, and it confuses the branch storage format (I keep my local unpacked branch, and the packed branch is hidden by it).

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/

Junio C Hamano· Jul 17, 2014, 16:35 UTC · re: Matthieu Moy · lore

Re: Syncing Git Repositories

Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr> writes:

Show 30 quoted lines

> Sajan Parikh <sajan@parikh.io> writes:
>
>> By syncing my code folder and git repositories in this way, do I risk
>> borking any repositories?  I'm 99% confident I'm not, since everything
>> is in .git/, and there are not external databases or log files that
>> need to be updated.  Just making sure though.
>
> You're right that there are no external database, hence if you actually
> sync the whole worktree+.git/, you won't have any problem.
>
> I synchonize a bunch of Git repositories between machines with Unison
> (file transfer utility), it works great.
>
> One issue you may encounter is if you have either partial
> synchronization (e.g. network loss in the middle of a synchronization, I
> don't know how owncloud deals with it), or two way synchronization
> (there's a synchronization between your laptop and owncloud ongoing, and
> you start working on your desktop and trigger a synchronization.
>
> I sometimes encounter this situation with unison. The good news is that
> in 99,999% of cases where I'd encounter a problem, Unison shows a
> conflict on the index file (modified on both sides). So, in these cases,
> I just use Git normally to synchronize, decide that one side becomes the
> reference, and rsync to the other to resolve the Unison conflict.
>
> Also, you have to ensure that you synchronize both file
> additions/modifications, and file deletions. I often make the mistake of
> using rsync without --delete, and it confuses the branch storage format
> (I keep my local unpacked branch, and the packed branch is hidden by
> it).

All correct but .git/index may need to be refreshed, as your cloudSync is unlikely to sync stat details across filesystems, especially inum and possibly uid.