ABOUT GIT-LOCK

Git was designed to be a SCM system for a distributed development set-up with hundreds of developers. However git is also great for smaller development teams to bring their work together.

If a projects contains binary files on which the members of a projects have to work on in parallel, a distributed SCM system becomes hard to work with, just because binary files can't be easily merged. Git-lock was designed to bring a locking feature for small development teams, to avoid merge conflicts of binary files.

BUILDING GIT-LOCK

$ make

• Install the server: See target/server/README
• Install the client: See target/client/README

USING GIT-LOCK

Git-lock consists of three components.

• Server: The server component controls the lock of files on a central server.
• Client: Each git-lock client is able to send lock requests to the server.
• Git hooks: Git-lock makes sure that a client can't commit changes to a lock file if someone else locked the file.

SHOW ALL AVAILABLE COMMANDS

$ git-lock --help

INIT GIT BARE REPOSITORY

When receiving a push to a bare repository git-lock needs to verify that all changes are valid e.g. that no locked file was pushed. Therefore a git hook needs to be installed in all bare repositories which need to be checked before accepting a push. As the hook needs to communicate with the lock server it needs to be initialized to get and store the server details:

$ cd $BARE_REPO_PATH

$ git-lock init --bare

SAMPLE INIT & LOCK FILE

• Clone an existing git repo

$ git clone [email protected]:/apps/git/sample.git

• Init git-lock and point it to the lock-server (stores in .git/git-lock.config)

$ git-lock config -server 192.168.0.80 -ssh-port 22 -remote-user alice -project foo

• Tell git-lock for which version this branch will be used (optional) This gives the opportunity to lock a file for a specific version of the development cycle. If this isn't done then git-lock will lock all files against the master release. This information gets stored on the server and must only be done ones per branch.

$ git-lock switch-release -release 1.1

• Lock a binary file, so that no one else can push a change of this file until the change was pushed to the shared repo

$ git-lock lock image.png

• Unlock the file

$ git-lock unlock image.png

• Commit the changed binary file to the shared git repo

$ git add image.png $ git commit -m"changed image"

SHOW LOCKED FILES

• Show locks of the user

$ git-lock status

• Show locks of all users

$ git-lock all-locks

BREAK A LOCK ON THE SERVER

• Get the hash of the file to unlock

$ echo "src/image.png" | md5sum | cut -f1 -d' '

• Login to the lock server and remove all files related to that hash

$ rm $LOCK_SERVER_DIR/$PROJECT/$RELEASE/$HASH*