Jul 22, 2008 / software ~ ruby
Putting Git in the cloud with Amazon S3

I've been playing with the Git this week.

Trying it locally is all very well, but I now want to try it from various locations and computers. I guess I need a central repository...

Before signing up to GitHub or Unfuddle, I thought it might be fun to see if I could use it with Amazon's S3 cloud storage.

I only just got this set up, but it appears to be working!

In fact, I cheated, and used JungleDisk which gives me a file system wrapper on to S3.

Basic steps as follows:

  • Sign up for Jungle Disk
  • Download client software and install
  • JungleDisk gives you drive that links to S3 (my disk in the cloud!)
  • Now we just use standard git commands to set up the remote repository (thanks to Toolman Tim for nice instructions)
  • Use git --bear init ... to set up a blank repository on the cloud disk
  • Use git remote add ... then gid push ... to move local repos to cloud disk.
  • On some other machine, also install JungleDisk. Then do a git clone ... to get a working copy of the code.

I like this idea because

  • Amazon S3 is cheap
  • Amazon is low maintenance and has fail-over (unlike my Linux server)
  • JungleDisk works on Mac, Linux and Windows
  • I own the S3 account (no JungleDisk)
  • I can still access the S3 using other tools and APIs (such as AWS::S3)

Disclaimer!

I don't know enough about Git or S3 to know if this is a good idea! Anyone got any thoughts?


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