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IMPORTANT NOTE: although this page has a "gitolite.com" URL, this is not about gitolite. That's just an artifact of "sitaramc.github.com" being translated to "gitolite.com" and so ALL my git related stuff gets carried over. Gitolite documentation has another /gitolite in the URL, so you can tell. My apologies for this confusion.

It’s easy to forget that a lot of git’s features, including features concerned with remote repos like fetch/pull/push, can be safely and easily tried out locally:

• start with an empty directory
• create a new bare repo in it (e.g., git init --bare b.git). This is your server repo!
• clone this one or more times (e.g., git clone b.git c1; git clone b.git c2). These are your developer repos; you can treat each one as belonging to a different developer. The “server” repo you cloned from will be defined as the remote called “origin” in each of these clones.

Now you’re ready to test out whatever features you want using any or all of the clones you created.

Notice that we are simply using the local file system as the transport protocol. People familiar with URLs on a browser might recognise this as eqvt to file:///full/path/to/something, and indeed that is exactly what git treats it as.

Using ssh or http merely changes

• the URL used
• the authentication required and permissions granted by the server

What does NOT change is the behaviour of most git commands!

This means you can play with git to your heart’s content in some temporary directory. There’s no danger of messing up a real repo, or of getting side-tracked by connectivity or permissions or even speed issues, which might happen if you tried this with a real server.

If playing on a test repo is not sufficient for your needs, you can replace the “create a new bare repo” step with a clone of one of your real repos. For example, I might do this:

git clone --bare git://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite.git b.git

and that would give me a “b.git” that is a bare repo that starts out with all the code and branches that my real server repo has.

Note: the terminology page may also be useful, especially the section on “accessing remote repositories”.