Hacker News Reader

Comment by RivieraKid | Hacker News Reader

Me too. Public repos github, private bitbucket.

Honest question: why do you need a central repository (SVN style) if it's a private repo? I tend to develop my own projects mostly on two different machines, and the core code management and synchronization doesn't need anything but git itself. Is it so you can use bug trackers etc?

Hmmm..how does synchronization work without a server or direct connection?

There's obviously a direct connection between the machines. Synchronization works exactly as it does when you synchronize with GitHub. It's just SSH.

I don't think it's that obvious. Could be sneakernet, dropbox, etc. Is setting up a lasting direct connect easy?

You shouldn't be downvoted. It's not obvious how to use git to communicate between two client-configured machines.

If one of them has a public domain name or IP, or they are both on the same LAN (likely when one is a laptop and they are owned by the same person), then it's simple to communicate via git.

But, it wouldn't be so easy for, as an example, you and I to share code between our laptops in different time zones, unless we used a stable server somewhere.

Offsite data backup of the entire repository for free.

This is the truth.

I use bitbucket for this and also have it on s3 via Jgit

I see. I suppose that makes sense if you mostly work on a single machine. (Since I usually oscillate between two machines I never think about backing up in addition to the normal work-flow.)

You should think about that in case your house burns down.

Frankly, I think that's exactly what I'm never worried about - especially not for my personal projects.

Even if you work on several machines, having not to worry about whether they are turned on / are accessible from wherever you are is a huge plus. People tend to have laptops nowadays, which you don't necessarily think about as always on computers.

Well, mine is always on. :-)

The older I get, the more precious I find my free time and especially the work I get to put on personal projects. The last thing I want is the risk of that work being wiped out to a very easily avoided mundane issue such as a hard drive failure.

I had always said to myself that I should do this....but until I read this comment, I never actually pulled the trigger.

Just opened a new account at Bitbucket and am going to start doing this.

Public repos on Github, Private @ Bitbucket. This is brilliant.

Also it's a pleasant way to track changes, view source code, and share code with coding buddies.

I use Bitbucket with private repos for my code and websites. It makes it easier for me to use any of my computers or laptops to work on the same code and it also makes it easier to deploy to my webserver. When I want to deploy, I just do a git pull on the master branch. Easier than uploading files with SSH and it makes it a lot easier to rollback the server if needed.

For me this comes up working on collaborative projects with multiple people

For me it's easy to deploy the code onto a server which runs the code. I am not the only administrator, but the only software developer. I want the other admins to be able to pull code from that repository (bitbucket offers "read only ssh keys")

Why not set up a private bitbucket repo, and just always push your code to bitbucket when you're done working, and pull when you start?

It's a free offsite backup, and if you ever need to add another machine (or developer) to the project, your code is already sitting there on bitbucket. And you never need to worry about firewalls, NAT, one of the machines being off, whatever, because bitbucket is (almost) always up and accessible. And if you forget to push after working, or if bitbucket is down, you can still fall back to your existing workflow.

In addition, if you're doing anything web based, sooner or later you'll need to deploy to a sever out on the internets. Being able to pull from bitbucket makes deployment really easy, again without tinkering with firewall ports or anything.

It's not so much a question of "need" it's "why not do this thing which has some benefits, and no real downside?"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com