Using Dropbox as a Git repository

So last month I wrote a bit about setting up your own personal Git repositories on a Linux box, and how to use that for sharing code.

I’ve had a slight epiphany since then: what if I just used the awesome Dropbox (my referral link, if you’re likely to sign up) to share Git repositories between computers? Dropbox seems able to get through most corporate firewalls (my previous employer blocked SSH, for example), and is very unobtrusive in its synchronisation behaviour.

Enough introductions, make with the commands

Okay, here we go. Basically, we’re just going add a new remote which points at Dropbox (in the same way the origin remote typically points at your primary external repository). Please note these instructions should be mostly *Nix agnostic—but they’re only tested on OS X.

First, create the Git repository in Dropbox (assuming your repository is named myrepo):

cd ~/Dropbox
mkdir -p repos/myrepo.git
cd !$
git --bare init

And that’s the repository created. Basically we made a bare repository in the Dropbox directory.

Now we can add the new remote to our existing repository (again, assuming it lives at ~/Projects/myrepo).

cd ~/Projects/myrepo
git remote add dropbox file://$HOME/Dropbox/repos/myrepo.git
git push dropbox master

And we’re done. We’ve created the repository, linked a Git remote to it, and pushed the master branch to the repository. This Git repository will now be available on all computers that your Dropbox account is.

Pulling from the repository

When you get to a computer that shares this Dropbox account, but hasn’t checked out Git yet, do as follows:

cd ~/Projects
git clone -o dropbox file://$HOME/Dropbox/repos/myrepo.git

Which will add your repository locally, and automatically set up a remote called dropbox which auto–merges with master.

I think this approach could be valuable for things like keeping personal documents or text files in version control (or indeed personal coding projects) without bothering to set up your own Linux box or server. Git really does make these things incredibly easy.