Question

I’m a web developer. My company has a dev server that all of us work directly on. There’s only 3 of us, all working on different projects, so there’s no issue with people overwriting each other’s work. Because we’re so small, no one has set up any kind of version control, and I’m not in a position to insist on it for all of us. However, I recently broke some of my own code and can’t get it working again, and this makes me want to set up some kind of version control.

Here’s how I’d like this to work:

1. Make a local copy of my project that exists on the dev server.
2. Make changes on the dev server.
3. After every major change, commit to my local copy.
4. If the new change broke the code on the dev server, be able to grab the previous version from the local copy.

Because I’m frequently working in 6 or more files at a time, it’s not feasible for me to just manually create backups of each file before making any changes.

I’ve looked at GitBox and Versions, but am unable to tell if either of them will allow me to make a local copy of a remote project that isn’t using some kind of version control.

Does anyone have suggestions for a good GUI version control system for Macs that will let me accomplish what I’ve outlined above? (The main issue is step #1 – making a local copy of a project that isn’t already using a version control system and being able to update the local copy with a single action.)

Answer 1

With the mapping available via (Transmit)[http://www.panic.com/transmit/] you can pretty easily do what you are looking for.

One option that would give you the GUI interface is just to copy the files manually each time and then use GitBox to create a new commit each time you wanted to store a set of changes. That would work, but it would get tedious quickly. Tedious stuff gets neglected so not the best option.

A better solution would be to setup a little script that would do the copy and commit for you. Check out the following as an example:

#!/bin/bash

### SETUP:

### Set the path to the remote mapped directory
SOURCE="/Volumes/your/mapped/folder/path"

### Set the path to your local folder (this must already exist)
REPOS="/Users/your-username/your-storage-folder"


### MAIN:

### Move into the respository directory
cd $REPOS

### Initialize the repository if it doesn't exist
if [ ! -d "${REPOS}/.git" ]; 
    then 
    git init
fi

### Now copy down the files
rsync -a --delete --exclude '.git' $SOURCE/ $REPOS/

### Add all the changes to git staging
git add .

TIMESTAMP=`date`

### Now commit the changes
git commit -am "Committed: $TIMESTAMP"

Assuming you have git installed on your mac, that should work if you:

• Create a new text file with a “.command” extension (e.g. “archive-site.command”) and paste that code into it.
• Change the “SOURCE” and “REPOS” paths to the values to actual paths on your machine.
• Use chmod u+x archive-site.command to allow it to be executable.

From there, all you would have to do is double click on that file in the Finder and it’ll sync your local folder with the contents of the server’s directory and then make a new commit in the repository. It’s basic and a bit unorthodox, but it will give you a some level of version control protection without too much hassle.