Imagine you have a couple of local commits, and you’re going on leave tomorrow. You can’t push the code, because the build just turned red. What do you? E-mail patches to your pair? Push on a branch?

But there’s another alternative.

Git is a distributed version control system, but we hardly ever make use of the “distributed” nature of Git. You can share code with your pair directly. There is a package called git-daemon which comes bundled with Git. Here’s how you can use it:

Go to the directory one level above your repository and run:

git daemon --base-path=. --informative-errors --verbose --export-all

This will serve all git repositories in the current directory. Your pair can then pull code from you directly. E.g. git pull --rebase git://10.0.2.2/my-repo

One thing to keep in mind though: Git daemon does not have any authentication. DO NOT use this when connected to insecure networks. As long as you’re on a closed, secure LAN, you should be fine. And terminate the daemon as soon as you’re done.

Here’s a small script that will also print out your IP so that you can share it easily:

#!/bin/bash
echo "git pull --rebase git://`ipconfig getifaddr en0`/`basename $PWD` `git symbolic-ref --short HEAD`"
git daemon --base-path=.. --informative-errors --verbose --export-all

(The script is MacOS specific. You may have to change it to make it work for you).

You can save this script with the name git-serve (or something similar) and add it to your path. Then you can just run git serve from your working copy.

Hope this helps. And don’t blame me if you end up with messy conflicts :)

Do you know of any neat tricks for Git? Leave a comment!