Question

I have a bare repo that receives only pushes. When such pushes are made, I’d like for those changes to be reflected by the bare repo to another location (not a clone, just a static location with no .git folder).

Is this possible?

Answer 1

Sure. In order to do some action whenever someone pushes, create a post-receive hook. In order to get those changes from a bare repository into another directory (which is not a Git repository), you will need to create a git archive and expand it in the location that you want to update.

The post-receive hook receives on standard input a list of all refs that have been updated by a push as well as their old and new values, in the following format (where SP is a space character, <old-value> and <new-value> are revisions, and <ref-name> is the ref that was updated):

<old-value> SP <new-value> SP <ref-name>

If you’re only interested in mirroring master into your destination directory, you’ll want to only execute your script if you see such a line.

For example, something like this would probably work (untested, so test this out on a location you don’t care about before trusting it):

#!/bin/sh
while read old new ref; do
    if [ "$ref" = master ]; then
      git archive master | tar -x -C /path/to/expand/into
    fi
done

edit: Note that this has a fairly serious drawback; if you delete (or move) a file, this won’t delete that file in the destination directory. One potential solution would be to add an rm -rf /path/to/expand/into; mkdir /path/to/expand/into before the archive line.