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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML The bare minimum for syncing Git repos
mnahkies wrote 20 hours 0 min ago:
> I used to throw every scrap of code onto GitHub in the vague hope of
âsharing knowledgeâ
I looked at a random repo today, and used some of its (MIT licensed)
code as a starting point.
It was an expo plugin for managing android key stores, I didn't need
most of what it did, and I went a different direction in the remaining
bits - but it still helped me do that quickly. That won't show up in
any stats the author can see, but I appreciate their contribution
qudat wrote 21 hours 15 min ago:
I use bare git repos and then a statically generated git web viewer
using
HTML [1]: https://pgit.pico.sh
estimator7292 wrote 21 hours 41 min ago:
When I quit my last job, I was the only employee left that understood
our tech stack. The other was a mechanical engineer and industrial
designer. Because I felt that CEO could barely comprehend what git is
or why it's important to pay AWS on time, I made a full backup of
everything on a USB hard drive.
If you ever need to do this, it can be as simple as "git mirror", with
extra steps for LFS and other addons.
That guy definitely did not deserve me to give him $100 of my own
personal hard drive stash but out of some sick sense of professionalism
I felt I had to give him a failsafe archive. Because, you guessed it,
not one byte of the entire company was backed up anywhere.
Ferret7446 wrote 16 hours 32 min ago:
I'd be careful with that. He sounds like he'd be the dog that bites
the hands and sue your for stealing company code
socalgal2 wrote 22 hours 17 min ago:
It's common to sync via ssh
git clone ssh://mydyn.dns/path/to/repo
If you have unique ssh settings you can put them in .ssh/config
but fyi, depending on your needs, git clone/push/pull doesn't sync
everything. For example it doesn't sync .git/hooks
blibble wrote 22 hours 23 min ago:
I know you're not really supposed to do it, but I've kept my git bare
repos in syncthing for years
as long as you don't work on two machines at once and they're always
online it's ... fine
(I do have a daily backup though)
tomjuggler wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
Cool! I wrote a similar blog post last year when I decided to "Cut
GitHub out of the loop" [1] My motivation was mainly the fact that
Bitbucket cut their free tier, and who knows how long GitHub will be
free? So I tried and found out how easy git actually is to sync without
third parties
HTML [1]: https://www.circusscientist.com/2025/07/23/cutting-github-out-...
MonkeyClub wrote 22 hours 53 min ago:
> and who knows how long GitHub will be free?
Apparently for as long as it will enable Microsoft to profit by
training its LLMs on people's code.
For people uncomfortable with working on free/libre stuff with git
directly I always suggest Codeberg as an alternative, but hands on
git is also an excellent option.
tonymet wrote 1 day ago:
Wait until you hear about subtree
pwdisswordfishy wrote 1 day ago:
> You canât push changes to a non-bare repo â if you try, Git will
reject your push.
Sure you can. If the repo has branch foo checked out, but you're
changing branch bar, it will happily let you push to bar (or bar->baz).
And even if both are working with the same branch, whether or not you
get a warning or it's accepted or rejected is controlled by
'receive.denyCurrentBranch'.
> Because nobody can âworkâ inside a bare repo, itâs always safe
to receive pushes from other locations
Mmm... it's "safe" depending on what you're pushing and what's on the
other end, which is no different from trying to push to a non-bare
repo.
tonymet wrote 1 day ago:
This is one of gits best features . SSH deploys with offline remote
version tracking
fragmede wrote 23 hours 38 min ago:
GitHub having a connection of ssh public keys is another feature
that's really neat. You can give someone access to your server
without having to give them a password somehow.
embedding-shape wrote 23 hours 1 min ago:
Another nice little "hidden" thing is that you can get people's
public keys from just a GitHub username, and be kind of sure it
is keys in active use, by doing [1] .
Adding access to a new user? `curl [2] >>
/home/user/.ssh/authorized_keys`
HTML [1]: http://github.com/$username.keys
HTML [2]: https://github.com/embedding-shapes.keys
fragmede wrote 19 hours 40 min ago:
That is what I was saying. Thank you for giving the
instructions I didn't have the time to write out!
tonymet wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
this is a really neat trick
tonymet wrote 23 hours 8 min ago:
Exactly. And itâs great to move code around without having to
add keys to GitHub/gitlab. Wherever you have ssh access you can
push refs , build and deploy. Great for embedded systems where
you may have dozens and you donât want to add keys to GitHub
for each one.
jonathanlydall wrote 1 day ago:
> You canât push changes to a non-bare repo â if you try, Git will
reject your push.
You can push to a folder with a non-bare Git repo, itâs just that you
canât push the same branch which it has checked out.
Or in other words, if you get an error when trying to push to a folder
with a checked out repo, push to a different remote branch.
(I do this regularly between WSL and the Windows host)
kvikshaug wrote 1 day ago:
I had a collection of bare repos like this on a private server for a
while, but eventually decided to move them to a self-hosted forgejo
instance. It provides a nice web interface, and can be configured to
create a new repo simply by pushing to a new non-existing repo name,
super handy.
ghosty141 wrote 1 day ago:
Im quite happy with my setup.
I have the stock git server on a vm, gitweb to view things in the
browser and gitolite for basic permission management.
Very low tech, almost no maintenance necessary and I dont more for
hosting personal projects
_ache_ wrote 1 day ago:
You know you can send commit by email ?
alansaber wrote 1 day ago:
Funny to imagine they may have thought this would be a key USP when
developing the feature.
matt_kantor wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
Git was designed for Linux kernel development, which still uses
email patches for contributions.
alansaber wrote 22 hours 19 min ago:
I stand corrected, email appears to be a perfectly logical way of
sharing pull requests.
atq2119 wrote 21 hours 54 min ago:
Comment threads certainly work better through email than on
GitHub PRs, at least when you can use a good email client
(i.e., running locally, and not Outlook).
The challenge is integration with CI and other automatic work
flows.
donatj wrote 1 day ago:
It's interesting to me every time one of these "I just figured out I
can use git without GitHub" posts comes up.
The entire design of git was intended to be decentralized. You really
don't even need the centralized bare repo! You can just point your
machines at each other. With Tailscale these days that's especially
easy.
Admittedly, I'm getting old, but for the first couple years I used git
professionally ~2008-2011 we just pulled from each other's machines.
Directly over SSH. We worked in an office, all had each other's
machines as remotes. "Hey, is that feature done? Cool, I'll pull it".
It worked really well.
Eventually we tossed a bare repo up on a server in the office and
switched to push instead of pull. Finish a feature? Push it up! At some
point our devops guy installed Gitlab around that, but we never really
used the web ui.
Winds changed, we moved to GitHub, eventually a pull request / code
review workflow. Here we are now.
pimlottc wrote 1 day ago:
GitHub did an incredibly good job of capturing mindspace around git,
to the extent that many users donât realize that there is any
distinction between the tool and the hosting platform.
varun_ch wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm not sure if this is a large scale thing, but I know itâs
definitely true for myself and some others.
My first exposure to Git and GitHub was through GitHub Pages. I was
told to use the GitHub web editor, ignore all the âgitâ stuff,
and just write the HTML files there. Then I grew into using GitHub
desktop and later VSCodeâs git integration. At no point did I
have to use âgitâ on the command line so I didnât really
understand what the tool did or why. I think many people simply
donât see git without GitHub. Some even see GitHub without
touching git eg. see the infamous âI am new to GitHub and I have
lots to sayâ post
HTML [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4/i_am_new_...
mettamage wrote 1 day ago:
> Admittedly, I'm getting old, but for the first couple years I used
git professionally ~2008-2011 we just pulled from each other's
machines. Directly over SSH. We worked in an office, all had each
other's machines as remotes. "Hey, is that feature done? Cool, I'll
pull it". It worked really well.
Haha I'm jealous.
We used Airdrop.
And then I was like "shouldn't we use git?"
"Nah, this works fine, you have the code you need now, don't you?"
I was still in my second year of my information science bachelor and
he was +60 years old and had programmed for over 2 decades. I was not
going to argue with someone that experienced. In retrospect, I should
have. But I'd probably been shot down with being "that youngster that
always wants to use new technologies" (despite git not being that new
anymore).
cratermoon wrote 21 hours 41 min ago:
I recall a time when github was having an outage at the same time
me and a coworker were trying to fix a high priority issue.
I had pushed my changes before the outage but he couldn't pull
them.
I proposed that I share my repo locally so he could pull from me,
but he looked confused
and didn't get it,
so I let it drop.
inatreecrown2 wrote 1 day ago:
Funny you mentioned Tailscale, since the Author seems to work there.
1718627440 wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, you can even just push to an USB stick, if you don't have an
Ethernet cable available.
aquariusDue wrote 19 hours 28 min ago:
I sometimes clone stuff around my local filesystem and pretty much
yeah it's a shame GitHub has captured so much of the mindshare
around git.
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