Git forks on SkyDrive

The other day, I found myself carrying a USB flash drive between two of my computers so that I could continue working on some code that I had been writing. Every time you find yourself touching a USB flash drive, I want you to stop immediately, look into an imaginary camera, and exclaim "To the cloud!"

Most project hosters like CodePlex, GitHub, etc. let you create a fork on their servers to share changes between computers. The code I was working on, however, weren't being hosted.

To the cloud!

The SkyDrive apps for Windows and Mac create a special directory on your computer that automatically gets synced to SkyDrive and your other computers. I decided to create my fork there. Here is an example of forking my Places project to SkyDrive.

# Create a SkyDrive fork
cd %USERPROFILE%\SkyDrive
git clone --bare https://git01.codeplex.com/places

Note that this is a bare repository -- don't edit these files directly.

After creating the fork, add it as a remote to your existing clone. Here is an example of creating another clone of the Places repository and adding the skydrive remote. Do this outside the SkyDrive directory.

# Add SkyDrive fork as a remote to a new clone
git clone https://git01.codeplex.com/places
cd places
git remote add skydrive %USERPROFILE%\SkyDrive\places.git

To share work between computers, push your changes to the fork.

# Push to SkyDrive fork
git push skydrive work

To get those changes on another computer, wait for SkyDrive to finish syncing and pull them.

# Pull from SkyDrive fork
git pull skydrive work

There you have it, your very own SkyDrive fork! Now, what else can we do to eliminate that USB flash drive from our lives for good?