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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

Syncthing is excellent. I’ve used it for years to keep my development folders synced between mac, linux and windows, and except for some initial figuring out of ignore patterns and the occasional hiccup with filenames that windows can’t handle it has been great at doing what it needs to and getting out of my way.

(I of course also use git, but syncthing lets me choose when I push while still having all my work on all my machines.)

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> occasional hiccup with filenames that windows can’t handle

My only complaint so far and I've been using it for years. At first it started as a way to have my Keepass file in sync between computers, and evolved from that.

I do this too! Feels weird keeping code in sync between machines aside from git, but it works really well.

i always heard it fucks up with git repos?

I have an entire folder dedicated to various git repos...only thing it doesn't like (so far...) is some compilation artifacts. IDK why.

I would make sure that there's a `.stignore` file that's identical to your `.gitignore` (except for secret keys/configs you'd like to sync on your devices) in each of those repositories.

You can also make a global one for an entire shared folder. For example, I wildcard all node_modules folders as excluded.

Yeah, you need to add .git to the ignores. Works very well when you have only one repo checked out, for instance to auto-sync a deployment while you type, without having to commit and do CI/CD. With more than one repo you should be sure they are all on the same branch/commit before you sync. If not, you typically get a mess that requires some git-foo to clean up!

I use it to store most of my private git repos and have been doing so for years now without a single issue. I do this:

    cd ~/Sync/git
    mkdir reponame
    cd reponame
    git init --bare
    cd ~/work
    git clone ~/Sync/git/reponame

I guess this could break if I do a push and then shut my laptop lid before it syncs, and then do some more work on my desktop, push, and then go back to my laptop. That hasn't happened though. If it did, it should be trivial to fix.

There was some other comment near here about ignoring .git directories. I guess they're using it to store the working directory rather than just the repository, as there is no .git directory stored in ~/Sync/ in my situation.

not sure what happens if you commit on two devices before syncing, but the "worst" that happened to me is I get an index conflict, in which case it's easily fixed by 'git reset'

FWIW, I've been using syncthing for 3 years now and have never had any issues with git repo syncs.

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