I could use some guidance from the git experts out there regarding making push operations to non-bare repositories safe. Basically I have a plan about how to do this, and could use some advice about whether the plan is sane or not 🙂
Normally when you push to a non-bare repository in git, its working copy and index are not updated. As I’ve discovered, this can cause serious problems if you forget to later update them manually!
In our group, we have a few “central” repositories that people clone off of and push back to, but many people also want to be able to make clones of their clones and push/pull between them as needed in true distributed fashion. In order to make this safe, I want to ensure that every repository created via either “clone” or “init” has a post-receive hook automatically installed that will update the working directory and index after a push operation to be in sync with the new HEAD.
I’ve found that I can make this happen by creating a template directory with my post-receive hook in a hooks subdirectory, then having everyone in my group do a:
git config --global init.templatedir /path/to/template/dir
Currently my post-receive hook looks like this:
export GIT_WORK_TREE=..
git checkout -f HEAD
This SEEMS to work as desired, but I have some uncertainty about the checkout command. For the purposes of syncing the working directory and index with the state in HEAD, are “git checkout -f HEAD” and “git reset –hard HEAD” equivalent?
I ask because although I know that “git reset –hard HEAD” will do what I want, using it in a post-receive hook slows down push operations considerably in my testing (it seems to do a fresh check out of all files, regardless of whether a file is dirty or clean in the working dir). “git checkout -f HEAD” SEEMS to do the same thing much faster (get me a clean working directory and index in sync with HEAD), but I am a little nervous given the propensity of the checkout command to do on-the-fly merges with uncommitted working directory changes. Will this command really give me a working dir & index that exactly match the state in HEAD in all cases (including, eg., file deletions, renames, etc.)?
Thanks in advance for any advice!
I might have misunderstood the problem. Do you really want to set it up so anyone can push to a developer’s working directory while he has uncommitted changes he’s working on? That can’t be made “safe” by any stretch of the word.
What most people do is have their normal working directory, which is private, and make a bare clone of that into a public repo on the same disk, and share that one. That uses hard links so you barely use any additional space. You push your changes to your colleague’s public bare repo, and he does a pull into his working directory when he’s ready to receive the changes. Alternately, you push your changes into your public bare repo, and your colleague pulls from there when he’s ready. There’s a reason pushing to non-bare repositories is difficult to set up.