Mirroring gitolite

A long time ago I wrote an article about how to install gitolite. Yesterday an article popped up in my feed reader that shows a short script on how to mirroring gitolite servers.

Since I wrote my custom script once I had set up gitolite, I was a bit curious about the differences to my script today. So I checked the referred script and noticed some problems that probably occur over the time:

• New branches on the remote are not fetched
• New tags on the remote are not fetched
• Using working copies results in way larger mirrors

As one can see, the script lacks some major features.

#!/bin/bash
# Copyright (c) 2011-2013 Markus Holtermann
# MIT License: http://download.markusholtermann.eu/MIT.txt

BACKUP_DIR=/data/git-mirror/
REMOTE=git@git.example.com

if [ ! -d "${BACKUP_DIR}" ] ; then
    mkdir -p "${BACKUP_DIR}"
fi

cd "${BACKUP_DIR}"

for repo in $(ssh ${REMOTE} 2> /dev/null | grep -e "^\s\+R" | sed -e 's/\r//g' | awk '{print $3}')
do
    if [[ -d ${repo}.git ]] ; then
        cd ${repo}.git
        echo "Updating ${REMOTE}:${repo} ..."
        git fetch --all
        echo " ... done"
        cd -
    else
        echo "Cloning ${REMOTE}:${repo} ..."
        git clone --mirror ${REMOTE}:${repo}.git
        echo " ... done"
    fi
done

The magic to prevent working directories lies in the --mirror parameter while cloning a repository. To get notified about new branches and tags on the remote side, I use git fetch --all. The man (1) page to git-fetch describes it as

Fetches named heads or tags from one or more other repositories, along with the objects necessary to complete them. […]

However, the script above does not remove branches/tags that don’t exist on the remote any more. Since I use the script only for backup purposes, I don’t need that feature. But I would just remove all branches (local and remote) from the local mirror and would run git-fetch afterwards.

Enjoy the script.