Peter Mac And Associates

Setup Git Local and Remote Repositories

If you are a remote worker or, like me get some work done on the train on the way to/from your office, you’ll appreciate the need for set up of a local and remote source code repository, This allows you to develop using your laptop/netbook, check in your changes locally and when you arrive at the mothership later, you can synchronise your local repository with the remote one ensuring all your changes are available for other developers. This article shows how to set up git for both a mothership type repository (let’s call it the remote repository) and a local version on your own laptop.

Configuring Git project on the mothership.

Prerequisites:

A Git server (the mothership) has been set up on a box called bluelight. This box is available to the network as git.petermac.com.

A git user has been created on the server called ‘git’. This user has access to the folder where the git repositories are stored.

The Steps:

1.On your dev machine create your code project using whatever tools you need.

2.Initialise this working project under the git version control system

3.Add whatever work you’ve done to the repository

4.Check the files you want added have been added

5.Open a SSH session to bluelight – (the central git repository server)

6.Obviously substitute your real projectname and don’t forget to leave the .git extenstion

7.Initialise the repository under the new folder

8.Change ownership of the repository to the system git user

Configure git on your laptop to use the remote repository

1. Return back to the local machine and add reference to the new ‘remote’ repository from the base directory of the project.

2. Here the ‘git remote add’ part says add a reference to a remote repository. The second ‘remote’ is the friendly name I want to use when referring to the repository on the git server

3. Now commit the local files to the local repository – Note: Step 3 was only an add, not a commit. When you commit you’ll be prompted (or you can enter it as a -m option) to enter a message to be used as a comment.

4. It’s time to test the new remote repository by ‘pushing your local repository info up to it. This is done using git push

Didn’t quite go to plan – so let’s see what’s wrong

let’s try again

looks like it will work so remove the dry-run parameter

That’s all folks!