I was expecting the use of non-SSH git remotes without network access. Any mounted file system can be a valid remote such as a USB drive. I use file-based remote to keep some repos encrypted on S3 using Rclone.
For example, `git remote -v` would show:
`secure-s3 /mnt/fuse/rclone/secure-s3/git/$REPO.git`
I think concurrency is a problem with file-based remotes but for one person keeping a desktop and laptop in sync it is much simpler than running a VPS.
Putting the generic term into your corporation's name can be effective means of claiming things that don't belong to you.
Jon Postel reserved 44.0.0.0/8 for a generic purpose: "amateur radio digital communications." Decades later, there was a successful heist when some enterprising individuals who had incorporated "Amateur Radio Digital Communications" misrepresented to ARIN that the assignment had actually been theirs. Immediately after ARIN gave them transfer rights, they pocketed 8 figures reselling the space to Amazon.
Github obviously isn't making explicit claims like this but they benefit whenever people with purchasing power implicitly understand that github is the only option.
edited: Amateur Radio Digital Communications is not an LLC
That assumption has come up in almost every conversation I’ve ever had with semi-technical people regarding git, so the confusion is just a fact. It happens so often, I think Linus (or whoever controlled the git trademarks at the time) should have demanded GitHub change their name when it was launched.
You can also have multiple independent git repos that don't duplicate the full object store, via git clone --reference. It's less relevant in the container era, but otherwise it can save a lot of time and disk space when cloning repos repeatedly
What's the purpose of this? I don't get it. Why push at all to "local remote", if you can just keep your changes on a local branch, and push it whenever "remote remote" becomes available again?
I use this to push changes to a local encrypted sparse bundle image, and then I periodically rsync that image to a remote disk. Git has no built in encrypted storage, so pushing directly to a remote means you trust that remote.
I use local remotes all the time for testing as a form of "local CI".
Check it out from '/tmp' and make sure it still builds.
For a single-dev or small team, it beats having to do github runner epicycles to accomplish the same basic goal. Add in Firejail if you want environment isolation.
A decade ago I was working with an intern who wasn’t allowed access to push to any branch. As I wanted him to get experience with the development cycle, I set up a bare repo in a shared Dropbox folder and had him push code there.
Aside from that unique use case, I might consider this for storing code on a network attached drive (archival).
I am also seriously puzzled and don't see the point. Why push to a local remote if the real remote is not reachable? The branch is still not leaving your machine, you are just making a copy of it in another place and now have to manage `local/` refs in addition to `origin/`.
It's useful for me to have a "production" website remote that i just run on my computer for myself locally. rsync could also work but tagging with rollbacks make it easier if something goes wrong. it's not a common thing but it's nice to have that as an option. just because you can't see the utility of it doesn't make it useless
"local" can also be a network fileshare. It could also be in a directory that is treated differently than your other checkouts - whether that's something like deployment, sharing over the web, running CI, etc.
I love reading articles like this. It's kinda of a slap in the face – "hey guys, you know that thing you've been doing for decades, well for decades you've had this ability to do it with your own stuff if you just spend a few human brain tokens on it".
While yeah it's a thing that many people already are familiar with, I don't think it hurts to push out these concepts once and a while to help spread info to recalibrate those who hadn't learned these yet. I'd rather we have a bunch of articles explaining git specifics than a bunch of engineers that don't know the difference between git and GitHub.
you can also setup a local remote which hardlinks the index so it doesn't occupy more space. Why? Idk. You don't want to share stash, rerere-cache, branches whatever.
Also handy if you're running an agent in a container on the local fs. Set up a local clone, contain the agent to that repo folder and have it hack away on that. Later, you step out of the container and do the syncing. You can't use worktrees in this situations.
Bare repos are also pretty cool. You can clone the git mailing list as a bare repo and search for threads there instead of setting up an mbox (same for the kernel obviously)
A "local remote" is a contradiction. Unless the remote is on a different disk you are just wasting space. Even then the point of remotes is for sharing, not for backup/redundancy.
What if you have a few local machines you’re using for development, and want to keep them in sync? This method allows that single central repo without having to bounce all the code through a cloud hosting service.
The remote can be a shared directory that multiple users have access to, and the working directory is private where each user only has private read + write access.