Question

If you specify GIT_DIR=”.git2″ it will only specify this as relative to the current directory. And in this case it will not do the “search up until the first parent dir that contains a ‘.git2′” protocol as it does with the default ‘.git’.

Also if you specify a full path like /home/me/project/.git2 it will not add and commit files to a path in the repository relative to the location of the ‘.git2’.

So the question – is there a way to substitute the folder name git uses to some other name than ‘.git’ and have all other aspects of the protocol work exactly the same way as they do with the default ‘.git’ name ???

Answer 1

If you want to do this for a particular repository:

export GIT_DIR=/home/me/project/.git2
export GIT_WORK_TREE="$(dirname "${GIT_DIR}")"
git ...

or:

git --git-dir=/home/me/project/.git2 --work-tree=/home/me/project ...

If you want to change the default name of the Git directory everywhere, you can do something convoluted like this:

git() (
    # if GIT_DIR is set, honor it
    [ -z "${GIT_DIR+set}" ] || { command git "$@"; exit $?; }

    # find GIT_DIR
    GIT_DIR=$(
        : "${GIT_DIR_NAME=.git2}"
        while true; do
            [ -d "${GIT_DIR_NAME}" ] && {
                printf '%s\n' "${PWD%/}/${GIT_DIR_NAME}"
                exit 0
            }
            [ "$(pwd -P)" != / ] || {
                echo "fatal: Not a git repository" >&2
                exit 1
            }
            cd .. || exit 1
        done
    ) || exit 1

    # set GIT_WORK_TREE based on GIT_DIR if it is not already set
    [ -n "${GIT_WORK_TREE+set}" ] || {
        GIT_WORK_TREE=$(dirname "${GIT_DIR}") || exit 1
    }

    # run the actual git with the discovered directories
    GIT_DIR=${GIT_DIR} GIT_WORK_TREE=${GIT_WORK_TREE} command git "$@"
)

With the above, when you run git foo it’ll search for .git2 instead of .git. For the working directory, it’ll use the directory containing .git2.