syncwip - Synchronize work in progress from one development machine to another

This is a hack to make it easy to synchronize work in progress from one development machine to another, using rsync.

The tool is currently specialized for this use case:

1. Synchronizing code in a local git repository directory to a machine that already has the same repo, in the same relative path within user's home directory.

2. The source machine has home directories in /Users/..., i.e it is a Mac.

3. The local machine is the source of truth. The repository on the remote machine will be made to mirror the local repository through the possibly drastic action of synchronizing the .git directories.

In theory, I could just use git for this, but this is faster, and it results in fewer WIP commits that will have to be squashed.

The main reason for this hack is that I prefer to edit code on a Mac, but I am currently developing for Linux/Unbuntu, and I dislike editing code on Ubuntu.

Usage

$ syncwip <remotehost>

For example:

$ syncwip ironman

where ironman is the DNS name or path of your remote Unix machine.

You can easily use this tool with multiple repos. syncwip can be invoked from any directory in a git working tree, as it performs a git rev-parse --show-toplevel command to locate the repository root directory.

It assumes that the local path to the root will look like this:

/Users/{USER}/{localpath}/{gitroot}/

The {localpath} part can be zero or more directories, but you must have the same {localpath} on both of your development machines.

syncwip constructs the rsync destination path as:

${dsthost}:{localpath}/{gitroot}/

syncwip uses the .gitignore file to determine which files should be excluded/ignored from synchronization.

NOTE: syncwip does NOT exclude the .git directory from synchronization!

Synchronization is one-way only. The local repository is never modified to match changes on the remote.

Configuration

syncwip.remote

If the git setting syncwip.remote is define, its value becomes the default value for the remote host, allowing syncwip to run with no arguments.

syncwip.postsync

You can use git config to define a setting syncwip.postsync. If that setting is defined, it is assumed to be a command to execute in the remote repository directory.

For example:

$ git config syncwip.postsync 'make test'

syncwip will then automatically run the comand

ssh dsthost "cd {localPath}; make test"