Better Repository Management System for Developers

👋🏼 Introduction

If you are a developer then a VCS(Version Control System) like GitHub or GitLab is one of the most important tools you are using. When you want to clone a git repo, you might be copying the HTTPS link or SSH link and typing the following in your terminal.

git clone <REPO_URL>

The only problem involved in this case is, you are just cloning the git repo manually and there can be several problems due to that. Some of them are,

• You are just cloning the repository to whatever place you like and when you need it, you cannot find it easily.

• There can be multiple copies of the same repository in several places on your machine and you can get tedious in tracking them.

• If you have repositories with the same name cloned from different developers or different VCSs, you may not have a mechanism to track them properly.

So how can we have a proper system in our machine to track our local repositories?

💻 ghq

The answer is using a tool like ghq. It is a command line tool that provides a way to manage the remote repositories in your local machine hierarchically so that you won't have the aforementioned problems.

To install ghq you can simply use the following instructions.

• MacOS

  ↳ brew install ghq

• Void Linux

  ↳ xbps-install -S ghq

• GNU Linux

  ↳ guix install ghq

• Windows + scoop

  ↳ scoop install ghq

• go get

  ↳ go install github.com/x-motemen/ghq@latest

• conda

  ↳ conda install -c conda-forge go-ghq

• build

  ↳ git clone https://github.com/x-motemen/ghq . make install

After installing ghq we need to configure it using ~/.gitconfig file, so that we can store all the cloned repositories in one directory. To do that, create a .gitconfig in the root directory if not present by running the following command.

vi ~/.gitconfig

Then, add the following configurations there.

[user]
name = <username>
email = <email>

[ghq]
vcs = git
root = <directory_path>

After that, you can simply clone a repository using,

ghq get <REPO_URL>

And the repository will be cloned to the directory you have configured in ghq.root in .gitconfig file. And, you will notice that it will be cloned properly with,

vcs name → user name → repo name

There are additional configurations you can use if you are using multiple VCS systems and you can find them in the official documentation[1].

📚 References

1. Official Documentation