Git

Behind on coder chic

It took me forever to get into SCM and I’m really loving Subversion. …but now there’s git by non other than The Finnish Father of Linux himself. And boy, the world is crazy for it. And github, a place for sharing ideas is certainly in the running to get all sorts of kudos as the greatest addition to the programming world since sliced bread.

Git Down: A Recommendation of Swicegood's Pragmatic Version Control Using Git

As many of you may know I’ve been writing a lot. I mean a lot lately. One of the great things about being a humanities guy who knows high tech is that you know better ways than “email my gmail account a backup copy of this document that’s leeching my soul” to handle version control. I used subversion. A few weeks into my first project I became really aware of git, Linus Torvalds’ distributed version control system. My friends, the times that “getting interested in a new technology” has turned my KISS project into a monumental yak-shave is beyond count, so I resisted git.

Cleaning Up a Bloated Git Repository

I have been using a static site generator where the content is managed in git version control for this site for a number of years.

A decision I punted on really understanding when I was trying to figure how to get the darned thing working was how to handle static assets (images, mostly). To “get it working” I decided to commit the assets to the repository.

Fast-forward to the present: I was unable to deploy my site because the image copying was exceeding the processing limits on my web server.

I needed to trim the footprint of my git repository. Ultimately I reduced the footprint by 100x. Here are the tools I used to handle the problem.

Working With Git Submodules in Hugo

Additional Updates: 2021-03-15

I’ve been really enjoying Hugo static-site generation. I’ve been customizing it as a book-writing framework, and it’s great!

That said, Hugo likes using git submodules to manage themes and similar. As a result of this, when you clone the “main” repo again, your submodules are bare. One can change this behavior if one remembers, but I’m in such a rut of git clone <url> that I don’t really think about getting my sub-modules until it’s too late.

To clone and get submodules: git clone --recurse-submodules <url>

But if you forget…

git submodule update --init # foreach submodule listed in .gitmodules do...
    --recursive             # git update --init

To fetch latest:

$ cd submodule/path
$ git fetch
$ git reset --hard origin/master # or git checkout -q <origin/master SHA>

To add a new submodule:

$ git submodule add <remote_url> <destination_folder>

And to remove one:

$ git submodule deinit <submodule>
$ git rm <submodule>

References

Stack Overflow
I’ve also copied gitaarik’s awesome explanation (to save bit rot) after the jump.

Cleaning Up Your Github Repos

I was recently reduced from the staff of the Flatiron School and, after my GitHub accounts were terminated, I still had a ton of repos that had been forked from the company’s accounts to my own. The GitHub web UI doesn’t help with bulk actions, so I scripted it.

Strategy

Use hub’s low-level API to generate a death list in a file
Peruse the file
Feed the file into hub to do the deletion