git clone --mirror

I just finished reading the book a pragmatic guide to git.

In this book git clone --mirror command.   After looking it up at http://git-scm.com/docs/git-clone [1]

This is a way to clone a repository in such a way that it can be used as a remote repository.

I am still a novice to git. If I am getting part of this wrong, please call me out.

When I create a remote repository I usually do the following.

On the remote machine I create the directory for the repository and run the following

>  git init --bare

This creates the empty repository that can be used as a remote repository.

Then I push up a local repository to it.

This works great!

What about a second remote repository?

Currently I have all my remote repositories set up and working like I want.  I do want to set up a second, off-site, location for my remote repositories.   Prior to reading this book I had gone into my off-site, AWS virtual server, and running

>  git init --bare

Then I would push up to this second remote.

With the --mirror command you can cut out the middle man.

From my off-site server I set up the location to clone a repo to and then ran the clone command, but with the --mirror option

>  git clone --mirror git@git.example.com:/git/myrepo.git myrepo.git

Replace the location with your own.

Handling this "backup" remote repo

  

Now that I have two git remote repositories how do I handle keeping them in sync?

I could of course push updates to both repositories, but I imagine I will forget to do that sometimes, since the second repo is just a backup.

I could push to the backup repo once a month, or even year.

Or I could run this command from the remote repository

>  git remote update

This will update the remote from the original remote repository it was cloned from.  Also it seems like a cleaner solutions for me, since my intention for these secondary repos is merely an off-site backup.

Simple Script

All my repos are in one directory so I made the following simple script to update them all in one go.

>  sudo vi updateallremotes.sh

#!/bin/bash for folder in `find $PWD -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d`; do   echo $folder   pushd .   cd $folder   git remote update   popd done

It simply runs the "git remote update" command in every folder one level deep.

Make it executable

>  chmod u+x  updateallremotes.sh

Then run it

>  ./updateallremotes.sh

Adding it to cron, run nightly

>  sudo vi /etc/crontab

I put the following in it to run this command once a week (update the command with the full path)

# minute hour     mday    month     wday      who   command 22        2       *       *         0         git  cd /git && ./updateallremotes.sh

            -Issue this command at 2:22 AM every Sunday and its run as the git user on my system.

References

[1]  git-clone Manual Page

       http://git-scm.com/docs/git-clone

       Visited 9/2014