In a truly collaborative development environment in the same physical space (such as railscamp, rubyconf, etc) wouldn’t it be cool to just push and pull changesets between laptops, without the need for any central server or network?

This was the exact setup I waned to shoot for for railscamp, but geting it set up on people’s machines was too much—a central SVN seemed to work much better. It did however demonstrate it working, pushing, pulling and merging between four repositories on four laptops.

If you are going offline it may also be worth perusing fellow railscamper Dr Nic’s article showing us how to mirror an SVN repo in git.

Enable web sharing (i.e. Apache 2)

Firstly make sure web sharing is enabled (System Preferences > Sharing).

By default it uses ~/Sites to serve your files to http://localhost/~yourusername/

In my case I wanted to use ~/www instead of ~/Sites (all my source files live is ~/Sites), so I created a ~/www directory and changed /etc/apache2/users/tlucas.conf accordingly:

$ mkdir ~/www
$ mate /etc/apache2/users/tlucas.conf

<Directory "/Users/tlucas/www/">
  Options Indexes MultiViews
  AllowOverride None
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
</Directory>

Restart apache2, put in a test file and see what happens:

$ sudo apachectl restart
$ echo "Test" > ~/www/index.html
$ curl http://localhost/~tlucas/
Test

There’s little point progressing unless you get this working.

Create the public repository

Initialising the public repository is exactly the same as setting up a new remote repository with the addition of a simple step.

Remote repositories can not only be remote servers, but can be other repositories on the same filesystem. Git’s definition “remote” is “a different git repository”.

We set up a new bare git repository like you’ve seen before:

$ cd ~/www
$ mkdir -p git/myapp.git
$ cd git/myapp.git
$ git --bare init

Add then add it as a remote repository and push to it:

$ cd ~/Sites/myapp
$ git remote add public /Users/tlucas/www/git/myapp.git
$ git push public master

Enable sharing via HTTP

Deep within the git user manual are the two operations you’ll need to do to your public repository so that other people are able to access it via HTTP:

$ cd ~/www/git/myapp.git
$ git --bare update-server-info
$ chmod a+x hooks/post-update

Test the public repository from another machine

Jump onto another machine and have a stab at cloning the repository via HTTP.

$ git clone http://tim.local/~tlucas/git/myapp.git

If all is well you should now have a local clone of the repository. Fire up gitk to browse through all the revision history.