Barely There

So, this morning I get an IM from one of my teammates asking, "you don't happen to have your own copy of <GitHub_Hosted_Project>, do you? I had kind of an 'oops' moment a few minutes ago." Unfortunately, because my A/V had had its own "oops" moment two days prior, all of my local project copies had gone *poof!*, as well.

Fortunately, I'd been making a habit of configuring our RedMine to do bare-syncs of all of our projects. So, I replied back, "hold on, I'll see what I can recover from RedMine." I update the security rules for our RedMine VM and then SSH in. I escalate my privileges and navigate to where RedMine's configured to create repository copies. I look at the repository copy and remember, "shit, this only does a bare copy. None of the actual files I need is here."

So, I consult the Googles to see if there's any articles on "how to recreate a full git repository from a bare copy" (and permutations thereof). Pretty much all the results are around "how to create a bare repository" ...not really helpful.

I go to my RedMine project's repository page and notice the "download" link when I click on one of the constituent files. I click on it to see whether I actually get the file's contents or if all the download link is is a (now broken) referral to the file on GitHub. Low and behold, the file downloads. It's a small project, so, absolute worst case, I can download all of the individual files an manually recreate the GitHub project and only lose my project-history.

That said, the fact that I'm able to download the files tells me, "RedMine has a copy of those files somewhere." So I think to myself, "mebbe I need to try another search: clearly RedMine is allowing me to check files out of this 'bare' repository, so perhaps there's something similar I can do more directly." I return to Google and punch in "git bare repository checkout". Voilà. A couple useful-looking hits. I scan through a couple of them and find that I can create a full clone from a bare repo. All I have to do is go into my (RedMine's) filesystem, copy my bare repository to a safe location (just in case) and then clone from it:

# find <BARE_REPOSITORY> -print | cpio -vpmd /tmp
     # cd /tmp
     # git clone <BARE_REPOSITORY_COPY> <FULL_REPOSITORY_TARGET>
     # find <FULL_REPOSITORY_TARGET>

That final find shows me that I now have a full repository (there's now a fully populated .git subdirectory in it). I chown the directory to my SSH user-account, then exit my sudo session (I'd ssh'ed in with key-forwarding enabled).

I go to GitHub and (re)create the nuked project, then, configure the on-disk copy of my files and git metadata to be able to push everything back to GitHub. I execute my git push and all looks good from the ssh session. I hop back to GitHub and there is all my code and all of my commit-history and other metadata. Huzzah!

I finish out by going back and setting up branch-protection and my push-rules and CI-test integrations. Life is good again.