cogit

use multiple git repositories in a single working directory

the problem

some code naturally belongs to more than one repository, or code from multiple repositories need to coexist in a single working directory. eg:

in the process of writing a larger tool, a single file is developed that you want to publish independently on github
a project has public and private components, interspersed in a number of shared directories
a project has classified and unclassified components, inersprersed in a number of shared directories

by default, git doesn't handle this case well. some common workarounds are:

git submodules
git subtree in some cases these tools work well but somewhat complicate the workflow and still require that the code be split up into independent subdirectories.

a simple hack

cogit is a shell script that defines an alias to simplify using multiple git repos in a common working directory. it's equivalent to using --git-dir arguments

usage - creating a new repo

# create newrepo on github
source cogit.sh # possibly in .bashrc
cd ~/working/dir
cogit gitx
gitx init
gitx add some_files
gitx commit -m "first cogit commit"
gitx remote add origin git@github.com:username/newrepo.git
gitx branch -u origin/master master
gitx push

cloning an existing repo

git clone doesn't seem to honor these settings and won't clone to a non-empty directory, so explicitly set the git directory

cogit gitx
git clone -n --bare git@github.com:username/oldrepo.git .gitx
gitx checkout -- .

chaining

in one workflow, the working directory is part of an existing git repo. it can be convenient to track the relationship between this parent directory and the new corepo.

gitx-chain will install git hooks to store the parent repo HEAD commit in .gitx-data/cogit-head.txt.

gitignore

git honors .gitignore so if a parent repo is using it, you'll have to manually add anything that's ignored. you can define corepo-specific ignores using the exclude file, eg .gitx/info/exclude. you may want to link to the chained data directory (this may get added to gitx-chain eventually)

gitx-chain
mv .gitx/info/exlude .gitx-data
ln -s ../../.gitx-data/exlude .gitx/info
gitx add .gitx-data/exclude

gitk

this script creates a global git alias for gitk (unless the alias already exists), so to launch gitk with the correct $GIT_DIR:

gitx gitk

other uses

any time you'd like to use a GIT_DIR other than the default, this tool can simplify usage. eg, to put your home directory under version control

cd ~
cogit gitx
gitx init
...

nqzero/cogit