Newbie experience with push over ssh

Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Matthieu Moy]

Hi,

I'm playing a bit with git (still ~ total beginner).

I could create a local repository, commit in it, but then, I tried to
push it to a remote machine, on which git is installed.

I would have expected "push" to do this, but:

$ git push ssh://machine.fr/tmp/foo 
fatal: '/tmp/foo': unable to chdir or not a git archive
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

Then, I tried "clone":

$ git clone . ssh://machine.fr/tmp/foo
Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/foo/ssh:/machine.fr/tmp/foo/.git/
remote: Generating pack...
remote: Done counting 3 objects.
remote: Deltifying 3 objects.
 100% (3/3) done/3) done
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
Indexing 3 objects.
 100% (3/3) done

Gosh, "push" seems to know what a URL is, but not "clone", which
considers the _file_ ssh:/machine.fr/tmp/foo ...

Then only, I understood that I would have to log onto the remote
machine, and mkdir + git init manually. At least, this should be
mentionned in the git-push man page, but indeed, is there any reason
why git-push could not just create the remote repository? And any
reason why clone doesn't deal with URLs?

Thanks,

-- 
Matthieu

Re: Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Matthias Lederhofer]

Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@imag.fr> wrote:
> I could create a local repository, commit in it, but then, I tried to
> push it to a remote machine, on which git is installed.
> 
> I would have expected "push" to do this, but:
> 
> $ git push ssh://machine.fr/tmp/foo 
> fatal: '/tmp/foo': unable to chdir or not a git archive
> fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
git push is can only push into an existing repository, there seems to
be no repository in /tmp/foo on machine.fr.

> Then, I tried "clone":
> 
> $ git clone . ssh://machine.fr/tmp/foo
This means: "clone the repository at . to the directory
ssh://machine.fr/tmp/foo".  The first parameter is the repository to
clone from, the second is the directory to put the clone into (this is
optional).

I don't think there is any way to 'clone to remote'.  You'd have to
ssh to the other machine and clone from there, or you can just create
an empty repository on the remote host and push the stuff into it.

Re: Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Joseph Wakeling]

Matthias Lederhofer wrote:
> I don't think there is any way to 'clone to remote'.  You'd have to
> ssh to the other machine and clone from there, or you can just create
> an empty repository on the remote host and push the stuff into it.

I remember coming across the same issue as Matthieu and never got round
to solving it.  In my case the desire is to upload the code onto a
remote machine---in particular a cluster where I run simulations.  I
don't particularly need that remote code to be in a repo or otherwise,
since it's only there to be run, not edited.

As far as I know I have no way of installing git on that machine.
Perhaps I could install it locally but I suspect the sysadmin would not
be supportive.

So, is there a way of using git to upload my code to a machine without a
repo ready-prepared?

Re: Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Bill Lear]

On Wednesday, February 14, 2007 at 16:10:45 (+0000) Joseph Wakeling writes:
>Matthias Lederhofer wrote:
>> I don't think there is any way to 'clone to remote'.  You'd have to
>> ssh to the other machine and clone from there, or you can just create
>> an empty repository on the remote host and push the stuff into it.
>
>I remember coming across the same issue as Matthieu and never got round
>to solving it.  In my case the desire is to upload the code onto a
>remote machine---in particular a cluster where I run simulations.  I
>don't particularly need that remote code to be in a repo or otherwise,
>since it's only there to be run, not edited.
>
>As far as I know I have no way of installing git on that machine.
>Perhaps I could install it locally but I suspect the sysadmin would not
>be supportive.
>
>So, is there a way of using git to upload my code to a machine without a
>repo ready-prepared?

If you must ...

% cat ~/.gitconfig
[alias]
	scp !scp
	rcp !rcp
% git scp -rp . me@remotehost:/directory


Bill

Re: Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Joseph Wakeling]

Bill Lear wrote:
>> So, is there a way of using git to upload my code to a machine without a
>> repo ready-prepared?
> 
> If you must ...
> 
> % cat ~/.gitconfig
> [alias]
> 	scp !scp
> 	rcp !rcp
> % git scp -rp . me@remotehost:/directory

Thanks very much.  And (should have asked this first ....) is it
possible to init a repo remotely, i.e. to use the git on my machine to
do init-repo on a directory accessed via ssh or ftp?  And if yes ... to
do other git commands similarly remotely?

The latter would be a slow and painful way of working, I imagine, but
might be useful.

Re: Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Bill Lear]

On Wednesday, February 14, 2007 at 10:25:05 (-0600) Bill Lear writes:
>...
>If you must ...
>
>% cat ~/.gitconfig
>[alias]
>	scp !scp
>	rcp !rcp
>% git scp -rp . me@remotehost:/directory

Actually that was a bit tongue-in-cheek, syntactically incorrect (I
believe missing '='), I'm not actually sure it will work, nor if the
patch for this actually got in to 1.5.0.  The patch I saw does not
appear to pass the rest of the command line to the system call, but
perhaps I'm wrong and someone else can confirm.

If the patch to do this is reasonable, I would expect the command:

% git scp -rp . me@remotehost:/directory

to expand to:

% scp -rp . me@remotehost:/directory

and if not, I think it should, just as when I have:

[alias]
	pub = push /my/repo

and:

% git pub branch:branch

expands to:

% git push /my/repo branch:branch


Bill

Re: Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Matthieu Moy]

Bill Lear <rael@zopyra.com> writes:

> % cat ~/.gitconfig
> [alias]
> 	scp !scp
> 	rcp !rcp
> % git scp -rp . me@remotehost:/directory

[ in this case, I'd prefer using rsync ]

Well, this does not the same as being able to really use git to push.
First, you have no guarantee that the repository will be consistent
during the push. I belive the git repository format is relatively safe
with this regard since git doesn't rewrite data in-place, so the worst
that can happen is probably that someone gets a reference to a
not-yet-uploaded object.

But the real advantage of using the version control system to upload
is to avoid the case of 

$ cd /path/to/dumb/project
$ rsync ./ path:to/very/important/project/

since rsync/scp are not designed to look at the content of the
destination before overriding it. Using git, I believe such
miss-manipulation could lead to having irrelevant data in a
repository, but not to data-loss.

-- 
Matthieu

Re: Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Joseph Wakeling]

Bill Lear wrote:
> Actually that was a bit tongue-in-cheek, syntactically incorrect (I
> believe missing '='), I'm not actually sure it will work, nor if the
> patch for this actually got in to 1.5.0.  The patch I saw does not
> appear to pass the rest of the command line to the system call, but
> perhaps I'm wrong and someone else can confirm.

Can you explain in detail exactly what your .gitconfig modifications are
doing?  If I understand right, is there any particular point in
bothering with these aliases, is it not just equivalent to using scp by
itself?

Re: Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Bill Lear]

On Wednesday, February 14, 2007 at 16:48:19 (+0000) Joseph Wakeling writes:
>...
>Can you explain in detail exactly what your .gitconfig modifications are
>doing?  If I understand right, is there any particular point in
>bothering with these aliases, is it not just equivalent to using scp by
>itself?

Well, that was my tongue-in-cheek bit.  My intent was to just say "Why
not simply use scp/rcp/rsync, whatever?", as that seemed to be what
you were asking git to do.  But, if you had to do it, I thought you
could, using the aliases I outlined (and, as it turns out, I may have
even been wrong about that).


Bill

Re: Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Matthieu Moy]

Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@webdrake.net> writes:

> If I understand right, is there any particular point in
> bothering with these aliases,

Not any. The joke was just "if you insist in having git at the
beginning of the command line, ...".

-- 
Matthieu

Re: Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Joseph Wakeling]

Matthieu Moy wrote:
> Not any. The joke was just "if you insist in having git at the
> beginning of the command line, ...".

Forgive me, I have a BAAD cold today and many things are going over my
head .... :-)

That is frustrating, though, that I can't push/upload code in the same
way as I can with bzr.  Unless I _can_ init-repo on the remote machine
with the git on my own .... ?

Re: Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Wed, 14 Feb 2007, Joseph Wakeling wrote:

> That is frustrating, though, that I can't push/upload code in the same
> way as I can with bzr.  Unless I _can_ init-repo on the remote machine
> with the git on my own .... ?

What would be the point if you don't have GIT on the remote system?

Just use rsync or scp to copy your code over and be happy.


Nicolas

Re: Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Joseph Wakeling]

Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> What would be the point if you don't have GIT on the remote system?
> 
> Just use rsync or scp to copy your code over and be happy.

For one thing, I might be making small changes or have unversioned files
in my local directory that I don't want to copy.  I only want to push
across the latest code in the branch.

Re: Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Jeff King]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 05:47:03PM +0000, Joseph Wakeling wrote:

> For one thing, I might be making small changes or have unversioned files
> in my local directory that I don't want to copy.  I only want to push
> across the latest code in the branch.

rsync will efficiently push small changes. Just feed it input from git's
list of versioned files:

git ls-files -z | rsync -a --files-from=- -0 . host:/path/to/dest

-Peff

Re: Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Matthias Lederhofer]

Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@webdrake.net> wrote:
> I remember coming across the same issue as Matthieu and never got round
> to solving it.  In my case the desire is to upload the code onto a
> remote machine---in particular a cluster where I run simulations.  I
> don't particularly need that remote code to be in a repo or otherwise,
> since it's only there to be run, not edited.

git archive --format=tar HEAD | ssh remote 'cd /some/where;tar xvf -'

You could put this in a shell script which takes the remote hostname,
path and optionally the revision to send..

Re: Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Joseph Wakeling]

Matthias Lederhofer wrote:
> Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@webdrake.net> wrote:
>> I remember coming across the same issue as Matthieu and never got round
>> to solving it.  In my case the desire is to upload the code onto a
>> remote machine---in particular a cluster where I run simulations.  I
>> don't particularly need that remote code to be in a repo or otherwise,
>> since it's only there to be run, not edited.
> 
> git archive --format=tar HEAD | ssh remote 'cd /some/where;tar xvf -'
> 
> You could put this in a shell script which takes the remote hostname,
> path and optionally the revision to send..

Aaahhh, that looks quite an elegant solution.  Thank you very much!

Re: Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Wed, 14 Feb 2007, Joseph Wakeling wrote:

> Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > What would be the point if you don't have GIT on the remote system?
> > 
> > Just use rsync or scp to copy your code over and be happy.
> 
> For one thing, I might be making small changes or have unversioned files
> in my local directory that I don't want to copy.  I only want to push
> across the latest code in the branch.

Try this then:

  git archive --format=tar <branch_name> | ssh <remote_machine> tar -xf -

You can also use the --prefix= argument to git-archive in order to 
specify a subdirectory on the remote machine.


Nicolas

Re: Newbie experience with push over ssh

[Andreas Ericsson]

Bill Lear wrote:
> On Wednesday, February 14, 2007 at 16:10:45 (+0000) Joseph Wakeling writes:
>> Matthias Lederhofer wrote:
>>> I don't think there is any way to 'clone to remote'.  You'd have to
>>> ssh to the other machine and clone from there, or you can just create
>>> an empty repository on the remote host and push the stuff into it.
>> I remember coming across the same issue as Matthieu and never got round
>> to solving it.  In my case the desire is to upload the code onto a
>> remote machine---in particular a cluster where I run simulations.  I
>> don't particularly need that remote code to be in a repo or otherwise,
>> since it's only there to be run, not edited.
>>
>> As far as I know I have no way of installing git on that machine.
>> Perhaps I could install it locally but I suspect the sysadmin would not
>> be supportive.
>>
>> So, is there a way of using git to upload my code to a machine without a
>> repo ready-prepared?
> 
> If you must ...
> 
> % cat ~/.gitconfig
> [alias]
> 	scp !scp
> 	rcp !rcp
> % git scp -rp . me@remotehost:/directory
>

:-)

Perhaps a better solution would be to do

git archive --format=tar --prefix=project/ | bzip2 -f9 | \
	ssh user@remote -C "cat > project.tar.bz2"

Then unpack and build as usual on the remote end. Works a treat and is
currently the gist of the only line in my "push-to-web" script (the rest
of it just extends the command to run to also unpack the tarball).

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231