Why?
I was searching for a solution to get private repositories for my personal project. Github is fine for that but private repositories in Github is not free. So I concluded Github was not fine enough :). After some “googlisement”, I found “Bitbucker” as the savior and then I found “Dropbox”! What’s pretty sweet idea!
Actually, I needed a free service, an easy to access git server, an easy sharing with a community. Dropbox made git repository as easy to reach as a local directory. In addition, no ssh public is no needed anymore! It is as sweet as that.
How?
1. Dropbox
You must first have a Dropbox account and install the application on your computer. Once you have you Dropbox directory synchronized, you can considere your “git server” is ready for the job.
2. The repository
Then create the git repository. On Windows (sometimes we can’t choice to be free… :’-( ) you can use a Git+. This cool application provides a unix-like terminal powerded by Cygwin tool.
cd ~/Dropbox
mkdir myrepo.git
cd !$
git --bare init
3. Share the repository with your team mates (Optionnal)
Go to your Dropbox directory in the explorer. Right clicks on the repository folder : Dropbox > Share the folder. Then enter the mail of the persons you want to add and share you repository with.
Notice : the entered mail addresses must be the same addresses used by your team mates to create their dropbox accounts.
4. Working directory
- Create a working directory
cd ~/Projects/myrepo # or go to you project directory
git init
git remote add origin ~/Dropbox/myrepo.git
touch test.txt
git add test.txt
git commit test.txt -m 'Initial commit'
git push origin master
- Clone a repo from an existing directory
The repository should have been already shared with you via Dropbox.
git clone ~/Dropbox/myrepo.git
That’s it! No more git user to use anymore, no more privileges to care about, Git and Dropbox made it possible! :)