git-sync

git-sync

git-sync allows near-instant syncing of arbitrarily large working directories.

git-sync uses SSH, rsync and git (and optionally watchman via fsmonitor) to efficiently copy local working directory changes to a mirrored copy on a different machine. The goal is generally to be able to reliably sync (even on an LTE connection) within 500ms even if the repo contains more than 250k files. It's often possible to sync in under 250ms, which is a reasonable threshold for "instant".

git-sync is destructive to the target working directory - it will git {clean,reset,checkout} to ensure the source and destination working directories are equivalent.

git-sync Config

git-sync reads a few variables from the [sync] section of the git config:

sync.remoteName (default "sync")

This sets remote target to use for syncing changes, including the SSH URL used for rsync operations.

sync.excludePaths (default empty)

A colon-delimited list of patterns that will be passed to git clean on the remote target. This allows some remote data to persist, even if it does not exist in the source workdir.

sync.rsyncRemotePath (default "/usr/local/bin/rsync")

The path for the remote rsync binary.

core.fsmonitor

If core.fsmonitor is configured, it will be used to find changes quickly. A good implementation of git-fsmonitor is included in this repo.

git-sync Quick Start

For the fastest performance, you will need watchman installed. On OS X this is easy, your mileage may vary.

brew install watchman

Install tools and configure git:

# Get the tools installed
go get github.com/msolo/git-mg/cmd/git-sync
go get github.com/msolo/git-mg/cmd/git-fsmonitor

# Configure git - more relevant for large repos, but generally harmless.
git config core.fsmonitor git-fsmonitor
git config core.fsmonitorhookversion 1
git config core.untrackedcache true
git update-index --index-version 4 --split-index --untracked-cache --fsmonitor --refresh

Bash nuts can get albeit simplistic completion by appending the following to their .bashrc:

which git-sync > /dev/null && complete -C git-sync git-sync

Configure git-sync in repo of your choosing:

git remote set-url sync phoenix.casa:src/my-project
git-sync push

You can also pull changes from the remote workdir. This is not without some risk, and depending on your development model might not be necessary or even a good idea. That said, it has proved handy in a number of cases where the development platform (usually OS X) does not match the test/deploy platform (usually Linux) and the development environment does not have a full set of cross-compiling tools.

git-sync pull

However, most of the time you will end up using in a batch of commands like so:

git-sync push && ssh remote "cd src; run-horrible-codegen" && git-sync pull