Question

I need to create a central Git repository but I’m a little confused…

I have created a bare repository (in my git server, machine 2) with:

$ mkdir test_repo
$ git --bare init

Now I need to push files from my local repository (machine 1) to the bare repository (machine 2). I have access to machine 2 by SSH. The thing is that I think I don’t understand the concept of a bare repository…

What is the right way of storing my code in the bare repository? How can I push changes from my local repository to the bare repository?

Is the right way of having a central repository to have a bare repository?

I’m a little confused with this subject. Please give me a clue on this.

Answer 1

Firstly, just to check, you need to change into the directory you’ve created before running git init --bare. Also, it’s conventional to give bare repositories the extension .git. So you can do

git init --bare test_repo.git

For Git versions < 1.8 you would do

mkdir test_repo.git
cd test_repo.git
git --bare init

To answer your later questions, bare repositories (by definition) don’t have a working tree attached to them, so you can’t easily add files to them as you would in a normal non-bare repository (e.g. with git add <file> and a subsequent git commit.)

You almost always update a bare repository by pushing to it (using git push) from another repository.

Note that in this case you’ll need to first allow people to push to your repository. When inside test_repo.git, do

git config receive.denyCurrentBranch ignore

Community edit

git init --bare --shared=group

As commented by prasanthv, this is what you want if you are doing this at work, rather than for a private home project.