Git and Dropbox Comment
I started a couple of projects recently, both iPhone apps with Ruby on Rails backends – one I am working on by myself and the other with a friend. In both cases I am using Git as the source control and needed a central repo. After looking at Github, which is a great service, I decided I did not want to pay to host a private project considering the infant stage both these projects were in. So I decided to try and use Dropbox as the remote repository instead. This has worked out surprisingly well for both projects (so much so and to my surprise I decided to write something about it). To set up a project this way you will need to do something like this:
In the project directory …
cd ~/project
git init
git add .
git commit -m "initial commit"
In the Dropbox folder …
cd ~/Dropbox/git
mkdir project.git
cd project.git
git init --bare
Push project to remote …
cd ~/project
git remote add dropbox ~/Dropbox/git/project.git
git push dropbox master
To update your local copy …
git pull dropbox master
Dropbox obviously takes care of the syncing between machines and/or different users and unless you are on a really slow network connection or committing very large amounts of data the syncing takes no time at all.
My main worry about using Dropbox as a git remote repo was that pushing or pulling code while someone else is committing would cause corruption to the repo or my own local version. So far I have not come across this problem and I even tried to git pull during dropbox syncing.
