Repository architecture overview

Generally, each repository on my desktop system will have at least two remotes. The first, the ubiquitous origin, will be located inside an encrypted folder that is mounted inside the Dropbox directory and hence automatically synced to the cloud. This setup is replicated across all my other machines; its setup could be a topic of a future post.

The second, which I usually name backup, is located on a separate hard drive reserved for this purpose. It mirrors the whole repository, which is achieved using:

git push --mirror backup

on the first-time push.

Using git aliases to sync the backup on each push

Since this repository is (hopefully) never pulled from, but only kept up to date with an acceptable state of the working repository, it is therefore convenient to avoid having to push to it manually. For this purpose I set up a git alias in my .gitconfig, which tries to push to all remotes of a particular repository. In the case of the aforementioned origin, this command will naturally fail on the occasions where the paths have diverged. This I let happen and move on, since the motto is “fast–forward if possible”. Due to the nature of the backup repository, however, pushing to it should never fail:

[alias]
    ...
    pushallbr = !"git remote -v | grep -v 'github' | grep -Eo ^\\w+'|\
     xargs -L1 -I R git push R"
    ...

“pushallbr” stands for “push all branches”, one can of course pick a different alias. Note that I filter out github repositories explicitly (the -v flag in grep inverts the match). The purpose of this command is just syncing the local repositories, for the ones on github I want to retain manual control. In my workflow I usually use this command over the common push origin master and thus sync the backup “automatically”.

Syncing all sub-directories

Having set up our backup repository and added an alias that syncs it, an useful thing to have would be a shell script that descends into a hierarchy of repositories and tries to sync them all:

#! /bin/bash
{find . -maxdepth 8 -type d -exec bash -c "git --git-dir={}/.git --work-tree=$PWD/{} pushallbr" \;} 2>/dev/null

Things to note:

• Since we expect the command to fail in some (or many) cases without adverse side effects, we ignore the error messages by redirecting them to /dev/null

• To be able to use a complex git alias within a find ... -exec command, one must invoke the whole thing as an inline script via bash -c "..."