Git bare repository why

The most common use case for git init --bare is to create a remote central repository:. First, you SSH into the server that will contain your central repository. Finally, you use the --bare flag to create a central storage repository. Developers would then clone my-project. Initializes a new Git repository and copies files from the into the repository.

Templates allow you to initialize a new repository with a predefined. You can configure a template to have default directories and files that will get copied to a new repository's. The default templates are a good reference and example of how to utilize template features.

A powerful feature of templates that's exhibited in the default templates is Git Hook configuration. You can create a template with predefined Git hooks and initialize your new git repositories with common hooks ready to go. Learn more about Git Hooks at the Git Hook page.

All configurations of git init take a argument. If you provide the , the command is run inside it. If this directory does not exist, it will be created. In addition to the options and configuration already discussed, Git init has a few other command line options.

A full list of them follows:. Specifies the directory from which templates will be used. See the "Git Init Templates" section above. Creates a text file containing the path to. This file acts as a link to the. This is useful if you would like to store your. Some common use cases for --separate-git-dir are:.

You can call git init --separate-git-dir on an existing repository and the. Set access permissions for the new repository. Can you give an example about why I would need a bare repository and its motivation to work that way?

Edward Thomson's answer is, in part, what I wanted to know. Nevertheless, I will rephrase my question:. Somehow, a bare repository has to contain all data and source code. If not, it wouldn't be impossible to render anything, because I can see all source code updated commited , all branches with their respective source , the whole log of a repo, etc. Is there the whole data of a repository always within. Is this the reason of bare repository, while working copy only has the files at a given time?

Yes, those files and their complete history are stored in. When you clone a repo bare or not , you always have the.

From a bare repo, you can query the logs git log in a git bare repo works just fine: no need for a working tree , or list files in a bare repo.

Or show the content of a file from a bare repo. That is how GitHub can render a page with files without having to checkout the full repo. I don't know that GitHub does exactly that though, as the sheer number of repos forces GitHub engineering team to do all kind of optimization. With DGit , those bare repos are actually replicated across multiple servers.

For GitHub, maintaining a working tree would cost too much in disk space, and in update when each user request a different branch. It is best to extract from the unique bare repo what you need to render a page. In general outside of GitHub constraint , a bare repo is used for pushing, in order to avoid having a working tree out of sync with what has just been pushed. See "but why do I need a bare repo? This is generally straightforward to do.

In order to clone your repository to create a new bare repository, you run the clone command with the --bare option. By convention, bare repository directory names end with the suffix. There are a couple of minor differences in the configuration file but, for your purpose, this is close to the same thing. It takes the Git repository by itself, without a working directory, and creates a directory specifically for it alone.

Now that you have a bare copy of your repository, all you need to do is put it on a server and set up your protocols. Git will automatically add group write permissions to a repository properly if you run the git init command with the --shared option. It stores the hashes of commits made in the branches and a file where the hash of the latest commit is stored.

The default repository is always used for local repositories. What is a bare repository? A bare repository is the same as default, but no commits can be made in a bare repository. Bare repository is essentially a. Practically speaking everything in the repository apart from. Note: This is the exact same file structure of. Since you cannot commit, or make changes to it, bare repositories are pretty useless on their own. But then why does it exist?

A central repository also means that any new contributor can clone the repository into a local one without getting any unsaved changes or conflicting work of others in short, no mess. A central repository was strictly supposed to be something like a reference repository. This requires one to use a remote repository as a central one, and initially, only Bare repositories could be used as remote repositories.