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Péter Szilágyi edited this page Feb 9, 2014 · 18 revisions

SrcBox is a cross-platform git/mercurial repository manager for hosting private personal source repos inside Dropbox folders. Thanks to the nature of Dropbox, features include automatic synchronization between multiple machines and operating systems, as well as online backups.

Currently SrcBox is capable of creating git and mercurial repositories inside Dropbox folders, cloning repositories residing inside these folders, and importing existing source repos into Dropbox folders.

What SrcBox is not, is a collaboration tool between multiple developers. Sharing a source repository through Dropbox will have serious consequences as there is no way to do atomic syncs.

Philosophy

As a developer I’ve come to appreciate code versioning a lot, especially the distributed version control systems. My favorite ones are git and mercurial (thus the project, doh...), but it’s a matter of personal preference. I use git for most of my personal/hobby projects, theses and work, mercurial for third party projects; but there are some practical problems:

I use multiple machines and multiple operating systems, thus synchronizing my work between them and creating/managing backups is a pain without some third party source repository. For work, a company versioning system will do, and for open source projects github will do. But for personal research projects another solution was needed (private svc hosting is too expensive, period).

The idea came (not mine, Google it) from the file synchronization service called Dropbox. It keeps a “special” folder on the file system in sync between different operating systems and machines (i.e. whatever you place in one will be available on all); as well as keeping a backup in their cloud service. It’s private and can be inflated to a significant size – 40GB and counting – for free.

Thus the idea, that if we place a source repository inside the Dropbox folder, it will be available virtually anywhere, as well as backed up in case of a HDD failure. Whenever a commit is pushed into the repo, Dropbox would automatically sync it with the others... instant private source repository hosting.

Although managing source repositories inside Dropbox aren’t too hard (it’s the same as if you’d manage it anywhere else remotely), you still have to remember a “handful” of commands as well as long paths. SrcBox was born out of the necessity to make this process more user-friendly and automatic: creating, cloning and importing repositories should be one-liners.

Hope you like it; I’m open for suggestions, requests, bug reports and any feedback whatsoever. :)

P.S. Less is more... I prefer stable products over large feature sets.

Getting Started

Releases

  • Version 0.4.0: 2014-02-09
    • Transition from GitBox to SrcBox, adding support for Mercurial
    • Automatic svc installation in Linux Mint
  • Version 0.3.0: 2012-06-15
    • Hierarchical repository grouping
    • Fix: Spaces in repository names at listing
  • Version 0.2.1: 2011-04-01
    • Display command reference if an unknown command is issued
    • Fix: Support paths and repositories with spaces
    • Fix: GitBox clone status message always reported success
    • Fix: Linux and Mac OS X setup script used ‘\n’ literals instead of new lines
    • Fix: Windows version only listed repos with ‘hidden’ file attributes
  • Version 0.2.0: 2010-09-30
    • Mac OS X port of GitBox
    • Automatic git installation in Ubuntu and Fedora
    • User friendly output messages
  • Version 0.1.0: 2010-08-27
    • Support for repository listing, creation, cloning and importing
    • Automatic git installation in OpenSuSE and Windows
    • Automatic GitBox configuration in *nix and Windows XP SP2+, Vista and Windows 7

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the msysGit and git-osx-installer projects and the people behind them for creating and maintaining the Git for Windows and Git for OS X bundles respectively, both distributed with and used by GitBox.

Furthermore I’d like to thank some people who in one way or another contributed to the existence of this project (alphabetical order):

  • Attila T. Áfra
  • Bradley Wright
  • Daniel Tull
  • Lőrinc Pap
  • Pan Fan

License

The MIT License

Copyright © 2010-2014 Péter Szilágyi peter@karalabe.com

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

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