I have been using Git and Github for a little while and I think both of them are great. However, there are a few Git projects that I either don’t want to put on Github or can’t but I want to work on them on multiple computers. I might also add that I don’t (at the moment) want to pay for private repositories and instead of using an alternative online service I found out I could use Dropbox. To clarify, these are for projects only I am working on.

To start with let us assume we already have a git repository on one machine. The first step is to create a bare git repository in Dropbox. I have decided to have a specific folder in my main Dropbox folder for all my Git repositories, so we put the new bare respository in there.

git init --bare ~Dropbox/Git/New_repos

Then we need to add that as a remote in the repository we’re working on.

git remote add dropbox ~Dropbox/Git/New_repos

Finally we push to the remote.

git push -u master dropbox

The “-u” flag comes from this blog which I followed and it tells Git to track the bare dropbox repository as upstream.

Now if I am working on my other machine I can clone the repository with

git clone ~/Dropbox/Git/New_repos

and I like to rename the remote.

git remote rename origin dropbox

I know that I could do it all in one step as

git clone -o dropbox ~/Dropbox/Git/New_repos

but I keep forgetting. The -o controls the name of the remote and we can check everything looks ok by looking at the remotes

git remote -v

which should return something along the lines of

dropbox ~/Dropbox/Git/New_repos (fetch)
dropbox ~/Dropbox/Git/New_repos (push)

to finish. Once that is done I can push/pull as normal to ensure everything is up to date.