githole

A quick-and-dirty folder auto-synchronization system using Git.

About

I wrote this to be an extremely rough, bare-bones alternative to Dropbox for my own specific needs. Githole allows you to automatically synchronize files and folders across one or more machines. What it lacks in features it gains in total user control of the repository. It can be as large and/or tightly-secured as you want!

The idea is you have one master githole repository on a server, and many cloned slave repositories. Automatic synchronization is facilitated by the githole sync script. This results in a directory that remains synchronized across all slave repositories.

What githole is:

• Light-weight (i.e. it only uses Git and Bash) which keeps it on top
• Easy to set up and use (if you're familiar with Bash and Git)
• Extremely flexible (You have complete control of your own githole, so it can be as large and/or tightly-secured as you desire)
• Pure Git (You can use all of your favorite Git utilities :)

What githole is not:

• Pretty
• Feature-rich (it does exactly one thing: Keep repositories synchronized automatically)
• Event-based like Dropbox (it auto-synchronizes on a pre-defined schedule)
• Storage-efficient (githole currently uses more than almost double of its directory's size due to the fact that it's Git-based, and thus keeps a full history of every file)

Setup

Githole requires the setup of two components: The master githole repository and one or more githole slaves.

Master githole repository

The master repository is just a naked Git repository. Find a computer with sufficient space to stick your githole, and initialize a naked repo:

mkdir mygithole.git
cd mygithole.git
git init --bare

Slave githole repositories

Githole slaves are just a clone of the master githole repository (see git help clone for valid Git URLs):

git clone ssh://[email protected]/path/to/mygithole.git

Usage

To start auto-synchronizing your githole, just download and run the githole script specifying the githole slave repository and the synchronization duration:

./githole /path/to/your/slave/mygithole 300    # Auto sync "mygithole" every 5 minutes