Two git repos for the same files

Question

On my development computer I've previously used git simply as an automatic backup / recovery system. I know this isn't quite how git is intended to be used, but it has been very effective for me. I have a simple script that runs every 5 minutes (a la Windows Task Scheduler) and checks to see if any files have changed. If so, it creates a new commit (with the message "Automatic Commit") and pushes it to a mirror I have on an external hard drive. I can extend this to push to mirrors in other locations, too. I don't want to stop doing this, as the system has saved my life more than once. Between power failures, accidental file deletions, or a client suddenly deciding they liked how the project looked 2 months ago and they want to revert all the changes - the ability to roll everything back to any point in time has been invaluable. Now the problem comes when I want to put one of these repositories on github for collaborative work. Every time I push to github it creates tens or hundreds or…

Accepted Answer

I don't think your setup is bizarre. I know at least one guy who has an emacs hook to commit his repo every time he saves a file (he's an xemacs maintainer btw).

There is a perfectly clean way of doing what you want, thanks to the `GIT_DIR` and `GIT_WORK_TREE` variables. For example, given any Git repository, you can setup an "autocommit" repository that's independent from the "official" repository that you push to GitHub.

Initializing an autocommit repo

```
cd /path/to/project
export GIT_DIR=/tmp/autocommit.git
export GIT_WORK_TREE=$PWD
git init
git add .
git commit -m init
```

Updating an autocommit repo = autocommit.sh

```
#!/bin/sh
export GIT_DIR=/tmp/autocommit.git           ## same path as you initialized
export GIT_WORK_TREE=/path/to/real/project   ## same path as you initialized
git add --all                                ## --all takes care of deletes too
git commit -m auto-commit
```

That's it. The two repos don't even need to know of the existence of the other.

UPDATE

To answer to your follow-up questions:

if I used GIT_DIR to create a second repo in the same directory, would I also have to export GIT_DIR=/tmp/.git before committing my manual commits?

For your manual commits, don't use these variables at all. Use the Git repository as you normally would. The autocommit repo is completely independent, it doesn't affect your regular repo in any way. In short, no setup needed for your regular use.

I work mostly on Windows and I'm not sure if the GIT_DIR environment variable will work - can I use git --git-dir=... just as effectively?

I suggest to wrap the autocommiter into its own script, where it can setup the environment variables it needs. Since you have multiple autocommit repos, maybe you want to create a common `autocommit.sh` that takes parameters, which you call from wrapper scripts, one per repo. For example. This is just one way of doing it.

is it possible to change the git directory of an existing repo? Is it as easy as renaming the .git folder? Because I already have four or five projects auto-committing to the default repo instead of autocommit.git and I would like to change these.

I suggest to keep your regular repo as is. Create new clones for autocommit like this:

```
git clone --bare /path/to/proj1 /my/autocommits/proj1.git
```

Two git repos for the same files

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