A tip for git, discover multiple URL remote
While I was developing git-repo I stumbled upon a little known feature that has been introduced in git 2.7: the possibility to have a remote with multiple URLs.
Why would I need that?
What’s great with git is that it’s a decentralized version control system. What that means is that, even if most of the time you’ll work with only one remote repository (in a very centralised way), sometimes you’ll be happy to be able to have many remotes to work with.
An use case I had in a former work setup was to have an internal repository (that will feature the open code, as well as some custom features in branches for our paying customers), an external repository (because opensource is ♥), a production repository (for deployment purposes, but it’s not anymore a use case thanks to CI integrations that does automatic deployment).
Another use case, which was the one I ran into when developing git-repo, is working with several repository services at once. You’ve got gitlab, github, bitbucket, gogs… And when you’re working with all of them you got to create a remote for each, and push your changesets to each of them everytime:
git remote add github https://github.com/guyzmo/git-repo
git remote add gitlab https://gitlab.com/guyzmo/git-repo
git remote add bitbucket https://bitbucket.org/guyzmo/git-repo
git remote add home https://gitlab.myserver.com/guyzmo/git-repo
git remote add gogs https://gogs.myserver.com/guyzmo/git-repo
it’s a bit boring and redundant to do so, but at least that’s a task you do only
once (and you can do it faster with a great editor on the .git/config file).
But each time you want to push to your projects, you got to push to each of them:
git push github master
git push gitlab master
git push bitbucket master
git push home master
git push gogs master
And as you’re as lazy as anybody, you’ll end up only pushing to one, maybe two
of the remotes, usually github and home…
The multiple URL remote comes to help
…But you don’t really have to! You can work with multiple remotes nicely, by creating a new remote that contains all the other remotes URLs:
git remote add all https://github.com/guyzmo/git-repo
git remote add all set-url --add https://gitlab.com/guyzmo/git-repo
git remote add all set-url --add https://bitbucket.org/guyzmo/git-repo
git remote add all set-url --add https://gitlab.myserver.com/guyzmo/git-repo
git remote add all set-url --add https://gogs.myserver.com/guyzmo/git-repo
then, when it’s time to push your code, you just need to run:
git push all master
The only drawback is that it makes little sense to pull from a remote with multiple URL,
and when looking at your index, you’ll see that the all/master ref is updated, but
not the other refs (github/master, gitlab/master…). So if you want to keep all the
remotes updated you’ve got to run:
git fetch --all
which will sync back all the refs that have been updated when you pushed through the all remote. So instead of 4⁄5 or more commands to repeat, you end up with only two commands.
And you can make it simpler using an alias such as:
git config alias.pushall "!pushall() { git push all $* && git fetch --all ; }; pushall"
And how is it being used in git-repo?
When I worked on git-repo, I figured that’s a great feature to take advantage of. So
I’ve implemented a customized version of the git remote add, that’s being used under
the hood by git <target> create, git <target> clone, git
This is the git <target> add command, and it works as follows:
git hub add <user>/<repo> [<name>] [--tracking=<branch>] [-a]
there you can add to the list of remotes the repository as identified by the repo slug
(<user>/<repo>, a full URL to the repo works as well, as long as it matches the targetted
service provider). Then you can give a custom name to the repo and specify the branch you
want to track (with --tracking). The -a/--alone parameter is to prevent from adding
the URL to the all remote.
% git hub add foobar/project foobar --tracking=devel
Successfully added `foobar/project` as remote named `foobar`
% git remote
all
foobar
github
% git remote get-url --all all
git@github.com:guyzmo/clait
git@github.com:foobar/project
As a nice to have idea I’d like to implement would be to make the add command so it is possible
to handle remote add with just any repository, something that’s like:
% git <target> add user@10.0.0.1:./repository.git local_machine --tracking=devel
Successfully added `user@10.0.0.1:./repository.git` as remote named `local_machine`
At the time of writing this article, the feature has been implemented, and will be merged to one of the future versions of git-repo.