HowTo use Git for Collaborative Development

June 13, 2009 - 2 mins read

This is mainly some notes for myself so I don’t forget. Having worked with GNU Bazaar before much of Git is still alien to me.

This HowTo is divided into two parts:

what happens on your laptop, and
what you must do on a remote server where you publish your changes

So, let’s start stimple:

laptop> mkdir projectX; cd projectX
laptop> git init
laptop> emacs file1.txt
laptop> git add file1.txt
laptop> git commit -m "Initial commit"

Thus far no suprises, right? Now, some nasty git bits:

laptop> emacs file1.txt
laptop> git commit

Yep, doesn’t work. You have to add -a to the command line for “all”.

laptop> git commit -a

OK, so next item. How to publish this so others can see? Well, I have a shell account on a remote server, so I naturally try:

laptop> git push sftp://login@example.com/pub/git/projectX.git
fatal: I don't handle protocol 'sftp'

Does not work. OK, next obvious choice:

laptop> git push ssh://login@example.com/pub/git/projectX.git
fatal: '/pub/git/projectX.git': unable to chdir or not a git archive
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

Wow, not a clue as to how I should proceed. After some Google-Foo I found this article detail the steps for remote repos. Very messy, compared to Bazaar.

laptop> ssh login@example.com
server> cd /pub/git
server> mkdir projectX.git; cd projectX.git
server> git --bare init
server> logout
laptop> git remote add origin ssh://crash@vmlinux.org/pub/git/tetris.git
laptop> git push
No refs in common and none specified; doing nothing.
Perhaps you should specify a branch such as 'master'.
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
error: failed to push some refs to 'ssh://login@example.com/pub/git/projectX.git'
laptop> git push origin master
Counting objects: 29, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (26/26), done.
Writing objects: 100% (29/29), 9.54 KiB, done.
Total 29 (delta 10), reused 0 (delta 0)
To ssh://login@example.com/pub/git/projectX.git
* [new branch]      master -> master

Eventually I made it sing. The first git push must use the references to origin and master. At least you don’t have to care about that later, after the first push command git remembers what you want.

Only one thing left, in the gitweb project overview projectX is listed as having no description. Of course, since I’m starting to get to know git by now, I realised early this is probably not something that is propagated through push — yep, I was right. You have to change that on the server.

laptop> ssh login@example.com
server> cd /pub/git/projectX.git
server> echo "Secret Project-X use ROT13 to decode all source files" >description
server> logout

All done! phew