This post describes how to efficiently synchronize a SparkleShare project with a folder on the host.

Use-case

I discovered SparkleShare today and decided to use it to replace Ubuntu One, in a quixotic quest of having total control over my cloud one day. One of my uses of Ubuntu One is for synchronizing some configuration files (~/.bash_alias, ~/Templates, etc.) in a common folder (say, configs). Link to these files replace the actual files. e.g. :

1
2

ln -s ~/configs/.bash_alias ~/.bash_alias
ln -s ~/configs/Templates ~/Templates

I use my own server as a host of my SparkleShare projects, and I want to use my configuration files on this server.

My adventures in finding a solution

I started to search for some headless SparkleShare daemon that would synchronize the configs folder with the git repository that SparkleShare uses as a synchronization hub. Apparently there is a headless version of SparkleShare, but it doesn’t seem very clean, so I started playing with the git repository. Puzzled by the --bare option, I found a post explaining how to auto-publish a website using git. It provided me with a solution to my problem, in combination with the instructions to set up my own server from SparkleShare.

Example

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16

#create a new SparkleShare project:
git init --bare configs.git
cd configs.git
#tell git that the repository is not just a repository
git config core.bare false
#tell git where to extract the working copy
git config core.worktree ~/configs
#tell git not to complain about this apparently bad practice
git config receive.denyCurrentBranch ignore
#tell git to update the working copy
#each time the repository receives a new commit
cat > hooks/post-receive <<EOF
#!/bin/sh
git checkout -f
EOF
chmod +x hooks/post-receive

Conclusion

That’s it! Now the file you put from other machines in the configs project will be created/updated in the ~/configs folder on the host.

PS: if you’re an experienced git user and you’re having a heart attack, it’s probably due to my lack of git terminology and/or git good practice. As an excuse, it is the first time I go beyond git clone, but you will probably recognize the mark of an evil bzr user ;)… So I would be happy to get some constructive feedback on my git usage, or maybe on the SparkleShare feature that I missed and that does exactly what this post describes, only better…