This is just another way to give some use to your dropbox account. Although I use git in this article, you can pretty much do it with any other SCM tool.
First of all you obviously need a dropbox account. If you don’t have one already, go register for one and get 2Gb of free online storage.
Now that you have an account, create a folder on your dropbox and on the web interface and share the folder with some friends if you wish to do so.
All is ready now to start creating the repo. For this post I’m assuming you already have a local git repository of a project called my_killer_app and that you are working on a unix based operating system like OS X or Linux.
Open up a terminal, and change directory to your project folder:
cd ~/Sites/my_killer_app
The next step is to clone your existing local repo into the shared dropbox folder:
git clone --bare . ~/Dropbox/shared_folder/my_killer_app.git
The --bare option tells git to not include the project files. Only those files needed to track the versioning are cloned (mainly those present in the .git/ folder).
Now you have sort of a remote repository. Although it’s on your machine, it’s remote to everyone else sharing the folder. But to make things work we need to add this “remote” location and give it an alias:
git remote add my_killer_app ~/Dropbox/shared_folder/my_killer_app.git
There! It’s done. Now you can push your changes to the repository. And pull the changes on another machine with your dropbox account. Also people sharing the folder will be able to do the same.
Just for the sake of completeness, here’s how you would make changes and commit them to the “remote” server:
You made changes to the code, now it’s time to add and commit:
git commit -a -m "another commit example"
Nice! Now let push them to the “remote” server:
git push my_killer_app master
Piece of cake.
And here’s how a different user sharing the folder would do to collaborate on your project:
Clone the repository:
git clone ~/Dropbox/shared_folder/my_killer_app.git
Add the alias to remote repository:
git remote add my_killer_app ~/Dropbox/shared_folder/my_killer_app.git
And that’s it! Now it’s pull, commit, push. If you need more info on git usage you can check this manual.
