Git Tip: url rewriting

I use git submodule quite a lot. In particular, for my dotfiles repository, in which I have tons of dependencies to external packages, for example from the emacsmirror project. Of course, I also wrote some of the packages, or need to point a repository where my personal changes live.

This I achieve by having submodules like the following (from my .gitmodules)

[submodule "_emacs.d/packages-src/magit"]
        path = _emacs.d/packages-src/magit
        url = git://github.com/sigma/magit.git

Now something that’s been bugging me is the choice between allowing people to clone the entire thing seamlessly (meaning using the public URL of the repository, as above), and being able to hack directly inside the submodule (which would require to use the private URL, like git@github.com:sigma/magit.git). Since submodules only have one URL, I had no big hope.

But the clever git developers actually have a solution (from git 1.6.5 apparently). I just had to add this to my .gitconfig, and everything works transparently !

[url "git@github.com:sigma/"]
        pushInsteadOf = git://github.com/sigma/

What it does is extremely simple actually whenever I’m trying to push to the anonymous version of one of my repositories (they all live under sigma/), the ssh-based version is used instead. So I can only refer to anonymous URLs in my submodules, and everyone is happy. Note that there’s a more general insteadOf setting, that does the same operation for both read and write operations. See git clone documentation for details.

Like it. A lot.