You may have noticed that there are lots of posts and pages around here with random names, some of which break when you click on them, Well I am slowly importing them from my old WordPress skippy.org.uk site to this Dokuwiki one, however that means lots of syncing.

Since DokuWiki Settings I have been looking for a better way to sync my blog from here to there and back again… now still using Dropbox to deal with the annoying part for the moment, I tried Unison…

and after a few days I gave up trying to kick Unison into working for me as a two way sync; while I understand that it works for some people, I can only seem to get it to push changes made on my mac to my server; the first file that I write on my server and want to sync back causes it to get very very upset :( and complain about different versions, despite HomeBrew and Ubuntu having the same version of Unison.

I want to like git, but its a bit of a pain, its not intuitive, it moans a lot about 'merges' and don't even ask about how long it remembers stuff for.

On Server to create a bare repository (fundamentally just the .git folder), stuff on the server is in the path /mnt/archive/hostdata/philip/ (the user skippy and www-data both have full access to this folder) so that is why that appears every so often. I have called my bare git folder skippy_org_uk.git you don't have to add the .git bit, or even use the same name, I just want to tell at a glance what it is.

mkdir skippy_org_uk.git
cd skippy_org_uk.git/
git init --bare

This returns the message Initialised empty Git repository in /mnt/archive/hostdata/philip/skippy_org_uk.git/ so its all looking gravy :)

Now I want to make the folder that I am going to do the stuff in (and tell Apache about):

cd ..
git clone skippy_org_uk.git/

It will give you the following output, warning you that you have now got an empty repository in skippy_org_uk, this is what we were expecting, so don't worry.

Cloning into 'skippy_org_uk'...
warning: You appear to have cloned an empty repository.
done.

Now the entire point of this, being able to sync stuff!

On my laptop I head for ~/Sites and run the following command

git clone ssh://[email protected]/mnt/archive/hostdata/philip/skippy_org_uk.git

again it warns about empty repository, but again we are expecting this :)

At this point we want to copy some files into the new ~/Sites/skippy.org.uk/ folder and then push them to the server, however to try and keep our sanity for at least 15 seconds longer, we want to make a .gitignore file; mine is as follows:

.gitignore

data/cache/*
data/index/*
data/locks/*
data/tmp/*

.DS_Store
data/meta/access.log
thumbs.db
desktop.ini

Now we can git add -A the git ignore file, then git commit -m “Added .gitignore” to get that saved, and now we can move all the dokuwiki files into the ~/Sites/skippy_org_uk/ folder on my mac.

Because I don't care about commit messages, and am more interested in just keeping stuff up to date, I have written the following script to automate a add, commit, pull then push:

push.sh

#!/bin/sh

# Add everything
git add -A

# display status (nice to see its working)
git status

# Commit all changes with a UN-helpful message
git commit -m "Added stuff using push.sh"

# Pull before anything else (because the other way madness lies)
git pull

# Push our changes
git push origin master

#Done
echo
echo Done.

Oh god, literally everything is remembered, forever. and if you want to know how big your git repository is in terms of items you can use git gc if you want to know in terms of file size on the disk du -h -d1 will tell you how big the folders are³⁾.

If you got this far, you will probably also think this is pure magic!

git clone ssh://[email protected]:12345/Users/Skippy/Sites/skippy_org_uk.git