I have been using Dropbox for a good amount of time now, and something that I have recently started using Dropbox for is as a back-end system for private git repositories. While Github is great for public repos, if you just want to have a private project synced between a few computers or with another friend on Dropbox then the steps are more or less straight forward.
1) Open up a terminal and cd into your dropbox folder,
2) You have to make a bare git repository that is used to hold all of the git objects, this can be done by issuing the “git init –bare repo.git” command. This will make a new directory called repo.git with all the supporting files.
3) At this point all that is left to do is link up your working git directory with the Dropbox one, the easiest way to do this is cd into the repo.git directory. Then Issue the ‘pwd’ command, this will give you the absolute path (git will not use relative paths for some reason). Then copy the output from pwd and then cd into your working directory, and issue the command “git remote add origin file://[Paste in what ever came from pwd]”
4) Now that your working directory is linked with the directory on Dropbox issue the command “git push origin master” to load all your files into the dropbox. One thing that you will notice is that this will run a lot faster than when working with a remote repo over the internet. The reason is that you are not pushing files onto the intern but into another folder on your computer. If you look at you dropbox icon at this point you will see that it is syncing a number of files. If you have worked up a larger number of changed between syncing with dropbox you might see that it is syncing in excess of 200 files with the server.
5) To load the project onto another computer you can use the “git clone file://[path to the dropbox repo.git folder]” One thing to note before pulling any changes is to make sure that dropbox has finished syncing all of the files. If you trying and pull or clone out of the Dropbox directory before it is done syncing then you can run into problem as git will look for files that are not there yet as dropbox has not finished syncing, so as a not of caution, wait for dropbox to finish syncing before cloning or pulling.
When you want to share a project with someone else, then all you have to do is share the repo.git folder with that person, they can then run a clone command of that file to make their own working directory. While this does give an easy way to have free private 2 GB of git syncing space, there is no cool Github like web interface for looking at code. And as another note, anyone that can modify the repo.git folder will be an ‘admin’ to the project as all the server is really is just syncing file between computers.