In a
recent
conversation on the Archiveopteryx mailing list, someone suggested
that we move the code to Github because it feels very far away
right now (hosted in a git repository on our own server). Some people
agreed, and said that a project hosted on github (or SourceForge, or
code.google.com) would get us more visibility, while others strongly
preferred the status quo.
Although we decided against moving (and will instead focus on other ways
to gain transparency and visibility as the project moves away from being
company-driven), it was clear that having a mirror of our repository on
Github (or elsewhere) couldn't hurt; and that's what this post is about.
The ten-second summary
The Archiveopteryx source code lives in
a repository
on git.aox.org, and the developers push commits to it. We set up github
and gitorious as remote repositories on the server, and added a(nother)
post-receive hook to push any new commits on to those two
repositories. Voilà! Zero-effort mirrors of our code.
Gory details
On Github: I created an "aox" account, created an "aox" repository, and
added arnt and myself (amenonsen, since both ams and abhijit were taken
by people who aren't using their accounts) as collaborators.
On Gitorious: I created an account for myself (ams was free!), created a
project named "aox", created a new "aox.git" repository, and added arnt
and myself as collaborators on the project.
Then, in aox.git on git.aox.org, I did an initial push to both
repository mirrors:
$ git remote add github git@github.com:aox/aox.git
$ git remote add gitorious git@gitorious.org:aox/aox.git
$ git push github
...
$ git push gitorious
...
To automatically push commits to both repositories in future, I created
aox.git/hooks/post-receive with the following contents:
#!/bin/bash
nohup git push github &>/dev/null &
nohup git push gitorious &>/dev/null &
Update (2010-04-13): I put these two pushes into the background
because I didn't want to wait for them to finish every time I pushed
something to git.aox.org. But I was relying on ssh agent forwarding to
authenticate with the remote servers, and that didn't work once my ssh
client had disconnected. (I forgot to mention earlier that I have an
entry in .ssh/config that sets ForwardAgent on
for git.aox.org.)
So I switched back to blocking pushes, but that was so slow that Arnt
and I decided to generate new keys to push to these repositories, and
put them on git.aox.org rather than rely on agent forwarding. So the
pushes run in the background again now, and it works fine.
Github and multiple accounts
The Github Terms Of Service
say you shouldn't share accounts or create multiple accounts.
I found out about those restrictions not—I'm ashamed to admit—by reading
the TOS but when I tried to add Arnt's SSH public key to the aox account
so that he could push to it. It didn't work, because he'd added the same
key to his own newly-created account. I was able to add my own key only
because the amenonsen account I had created some time ago had an older
ssh key on record.
I asked for advice, and was told that I could set up an aox account with
no ssh keys, and just add anyone who was supposed to push to aox.git as
a collaborator on the project. That sounded good, and seems to be common
practice, but I didn't want to go against the spirit of the TOS. I found
an
old
question on the Github support site where someone from Github says
We try to discourage people from creating "project" accounts, but we
won't stop you from making one
.
That answer was dated December 2008, however, so I asked Scott Chacon of
Github on IRC today if the practice was still discouraged. He said it
was no problem, so I left our github mirror active.