I always tell networking engineers who aspire to be more than VLAN-munging CLI jockeys to get fluent with Git. I should also be telling them that while doing local version control is the right thing to do, you should always have backups (in this case, a remote repository).

I’m eating my own dog food¹ – I’m using a half dozen Git repositories in ipSpace.net production². If they break, my blog stops working, and I cannot publish new documents³.

Now for a fun fact: Git is not transactionally consistent.

If your machine crashes while Git is doing its stuff, you’ll get a major headache. I learned that the hard way: AWS restarted my server instance, and all repositories that are continuously touched as part of various CI/CD pipelines or cron jobs got corrupted.

Next: Git could benefit from slightly better error messages. This is what I got:

fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git

Weird, as I had the .git subdirectory in the right place. A frantic consultation with Google quickly produced a nice article explaining that I could be facing a corrupt .git/HEAD file. Fixed that, Git stopped complaining, but its internal data structures were still broken. My precious repositories were corrupted beyond salvation.

I told you to use remote repositories, right? Here’s how they came in handy:

• I hope you have documentation listing the URLs of the remote repositories for every Git repository you work with. I know where mine is – somewhere in the bowels of my infrastructure-as-code files. Not exactly the best place to look at when you’re in near-panic. Fortunately, after I fixed the .git/HEAD file git remote command produced useful output.

• I used the results of the git remote command to clone a sane copy of each repository into a new directory adjacent to the original one.
• Two renames later, I was back in business.

Lessons learned:

• Backups are important. Use remote repositories, even if they’re just different folders on a shared file system.
• For every Git repository you use, have the up-to-date printout of git remote in an easily accessible place. Your future self will be grateful.

Finally, if you love Linux commands that look like line noise, here’s the one-liner that will print all Git repositories found within a directory tree, and their remote repositories.

find 2>/dev/null . -name '.git' -exec dirname '{}' \; -execdir git remote -v \; -exec echo \;

Here’s what I got when I executed it somewhere on my laptop:

./EmailAssistant
origin	[email protected]:ipspace/ai-email-assistant.git (fetch)
origin	[email protected]:ipspace/ai-email-assistant.git (push)

./Hiking
github	[email protected]:ipspace/sloveniahiking.git (fetch)
github	[email protected]:ipspace/sloveniahiking.git (push)

Revision History

2023-10-01

You could find remote repositories in local Git configuration file.