SyncMeTool

The SyncMeTool package contains the program syncMe. The purpose is to loop over git repos and sync them with the remote repos. This allows you to easily check the status of all repos and pull from the remote repos with one command for each rather than manually cd'ing to each repo and checking the status or pulling from origin. This command is a combination of a shell script and a lua program.

To install

1. Install lua, luaposix and luafilesystem on your computer if they are not already there. On linux system they can be installed with your package manager. On a Mac, it a little more complicated. Please install lua and luarocks via brew. Then use luarocks to install luaposix and luafilesystem:

   % brew install lua

   % brew install luarocks

   % luarocks install luaposix

   % luarocks install luafileystem

2. Clone this repo.

3. Add the repo's bin directory to your path. For example if you check out this repo into ~/w/SyncMeTool then add ~/w/SyncMeTool/bin to your path.

To use

The first step is to create an env. var called SyncDirPath that contains a list of directories relative to $HOME that contain git repositories. Supposing you have git repos in ~/c ~/g and several repos in the ~/w directory then add the following to your startup files (e.g.: ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc)

export SyncDirPath=c:g:w

This will cause syncMe to look at the repos in ~/c, ~/g and say ~/w/lmod/main, ~/w/lmod/testing, ~/w/xalt/main. In other words each directory listed will be recursively searched until it finds a file or directory name git. The file name support for .git is to allow git worktrees to be sync'ed.

Then to check the status of your git repos you execute:

% syncMe status

to get status by running git status in each git repository as specified by $SyncDirPath

To update or pull from your repos you can do:

% syncMe update

Or

% syncMe pull

This runs git pull in each git repository.

Note that status can be abbreviated to st and pull or update can be shorten to up.

Typical usage

At the start of the day, you can run:

% syncMe status
% syncMe pull

to make sure that all local repos are up-to-date. The above can be abbreviated to:

% syncMe all

which will run syncMe status and if that completes with no commits required then syncMe pull is run.

When leaving for the day, you should run:

% syncMe status

to make sure that all local repos are up-to-date and that there are no uncommited files. You'll have to commit any changes or push to origin manually.

Important output reported last

The syncMe command tries to remove as much unnecessary output from git. It also saves what it decides it important until the end. This means that changes to a repo will appear at the end. So with SyncDirPath=c:g:.up and there is a change in ~/g, the output would be:

% syncMe pull

[pull]: On branch: main,   in directory: c
[pull]: On branch: main,   in directory: .up

[pull]: On branch: main,   in directory: g
   f709426..18ef6e4  main       -> origin/main
Updating f709426..18ef6e4
Fast-forward
 try.bash | 1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

Note that change from "~/g" is given last even though it is the second directory in $SyncDirPath.

Debugging

Sometimes syncMe has trouble connecting to the remote server and the important output will be hidden away in an internal buffer. If things do not proceed as expected then you can add the "-D" option to see the internal communications:

% syncMe -D up