Creating a central Repository using Git Bare

When working in a large IT department, there are times when you feel a bit like a Blue Peter presenter.
For example, there may be a requirement to colloborate with other programmers on a project but, for whatever reason, you do not have access to a hosting platform ( Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab – pick you’re favourite).

What you do have is a network share to which you all have access, and Git installed locally on each of your machines.

This can be thought of as the technical equivalent of an empty washing-up bottle, a couple of loo rolls and some sticky back plastic.
Fortunately, this represents the raw materials required to construct a Tracey Island or – in this case – a Bare Git Repo to act as the main repository for the project…

The Repository we want to share looks like this :

To create the main repository on the share, we can open a command window and create the directory to hold the repository on the share ( which is mapped to Z:\ in my case) :

mkdir z:\blue_peter

…then navigate to the new directory and create a Bare Repo …

git init --bare

You can then populate the repo with the existing project.

git remote add origin z:\blue_peter
git push origin main

NOTE – it could be because I was doing this on a VM, but when I first ran the push, I got an error about the ownership of the shared directory :

This can be solved by running :

git config --global --add safe.directory z:blue_peter

Looking at the files in our new main repo, we can see that it’s not shown as individual files, as you’d expect in a normal repo :

However, we can access the contents via Git in the normal way.
For example, I can now clone the repository to a different location. In real-life this would be a completely different client, but I’ve run out of VMs !

git clone z:\blue_peter

Side Note – Once again, I hit the dubious ownership issue :

Anyhow, we can see the files as usual in the cloned repo :

…and the repository now behaves as expected. If we make a change and push it…

We can pull the repo in another “client” :

After all that, I think you’ve earned a Blue Peter Badge.