Organised Git Checkouts

10 Feb 2021 in Blog / Tech on Git Last modified at: 2023-08-02

It’s all too easy to just check out git repositories wherever you are at the time you want it. This becomes unweildy once you have a few repos on the go. This article combines laziness and structure to live a more organised (git repo) lifestyle.

2 minute read

It’s all too easy to just check out git repositories wherever you are at the time you want it. This becomes unweildy once you have a few repos on the go. This article combines laziness and structure to live a more organised (git repo) lifestyle.

• this unordered seed list will be replaced by the toc

The Explanation

By default clone-into-dir will use ~/development as the root location for all clone actions.

If you prefer to have your code somewhere else you can set a variable in your shell:

export CLONEINTO_ROOT=/path/to/your/preference

It will create relevant subdirectories, and clone the remote repository for you there.

For example, git@github.com:chizmw/shellrcd-extras-chizcw.git will ensure into ~/development/chizmw/ exists then clone the repository into shellrcd-extras-chizcw in that location.

Assuming that succeeds, the script will check to see if you have code (the wrapper script that launches VSCode) and open the new repository for you automatically.

The Script

Save this into your path (e.g. ~/bin).

# file: "clone-into-dir"
#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail

# if you don't like ~/develpment simply:
#   export CLONEINTO_ROOT=/path/to/your/preference
rootDir=${CLONEINTO_ROOT:-~/development}
cloneURL="${1:?missing git clone url}"

# make sure the rootDir exists, and go there
mkdir -p "${rootDir}"
cd "${rootDir}"

# anything that looks like a remote git repo
pattern='^.+:(.*)/(.*).git$'

if [[ "$cloneURL" =~ $pattern ]]; then
    if [ -d "${rootDir}/${BASH_REMATCH[1]}/${BASH_REMATCH[2]}" ]; then
        echo "# project already exists: ${rootDir}/${BASH_REMATCH[1]}/${BASH_REMATCH[2]}"
    else
        echo "# cloning ${cloneURL} into ${rootDir}/${BASH_REMATCH[1]}…"
        mkdir -p "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
        git -C "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}" clone "${cloneURL}"
        echo "# repository cloned to: ${rootDir}/${BASH_REMATCH[1]}/${BASH_REMATCH[2]}"
    fi
else
    echo "# unsupported git uri: $cloneURL"
fi

# if we find VSCode, open the new repo
if type code >/dev/null; then
    if [ -d "${rootDir}/${BASH_REMATCH[1]}/${BASH_REMATCH[2]}" ]; then
        echo "# opening ${rootDir}/${BASH_REMATCH[1]}/${BASH_REMATCH[2]} in VSCode…"
        code "${rootDir}/${BASH_REMATCH[1]}/${BASH_REMATCH[2]}"
    fi
fi

Source

Just in case the script moves on after the article is published, here’s the source file