How to organize local git clones

• Where to put your local git repos so that they are easy to find?
• How do you avoid name clashes maybe two repos have the same name, or you have a clone of the upstream repo and your fork (same name)

Solution: mirror the git URL locally + shell bookmark manager

Repo cloning

By mirroring the URL locally it’s easy to know where to find a repo e.g. https://github.com/someuser/somerepo will be locally at /github.com/someuser/somerepo This additionally directly solves the problem of name clashes as my own fork (if I had one) would have the URL https://github.com/erikw/somerepo and thus live locally at /github.com/erikw/somerepo

I use the excellent tool ghq ($ brew install ghq) to clone my repos as it automatically clones the repos to a base dir following the above URL pattern!

(my clone base is ~/src)

$ pwd
~/
$ ghq get --look git@github.com:someuser/somerepo.git
$ # make ^ a shell alias like 'clone' or something
$ pwd
~/src/github.com/someuser/somerepo

This is how my clone base looks

$ tree -d -L 3 ~/src
/Users/erikw/src
├── aur.archlinux.org
│   ├── restic-automatic-backup-scheduler
│   ├── snp
│   └── zscreen
├── bitbucket.org
│   └── taschik
│       ├── flight-buddy-frontend
│       └── flight-buddy-server
├── github.com
│   ├── KenKundert
│   │   ├── nestedtext
│   ├── Rapptz
│   │   └── discord.py
│   ├── erikw
│   │   ├── advent-of-code-solutions
│   │   ├── dotfiles
│   │   ├── erikw.github.io
│   │   ├── escape-from-dev-null
│   │   ├── ewxb-gcc-cross-compiler-builder
│   │   ├── exsportify
│   │   ├── hackerrank-solutions
│   │   ├── nestedtext
│   │   └── ...

Navigating locally

So yes the clone paths are now a bit longer that is true. Once you’re in your base dir for working like ~/src/github.com/erikw all good though.

What I can really recommend is getting a bookmark manager for your shell. Then it’s a breeze to go to the above base or specific repo

This is how it works in my shell

$ cd ~/src/github.com/erikw/dotfiles
$ s dot  # save bookmark as dot
$ cd /somewhere/else

$ g dot  # jump to my bookmark
$ pwd
$ ~/src/github.com/erikw/dotfiles

I use fzf-marks (s and g being shell aliases to the fzf-mark commands) currently as I’m really in to the whole fzf fuzzy search toolchain.

Otherwise I maintain a fork of cd-bookmark that works for zsh and bash, also works great!