Kurisu

Kurisu

Using Git to share efficiently libraries between projects

You can go directly to the last paragraph of this post to read about my concern.


I was trying Git submodules then found the above post on Bitbucket, and it fits better my use case. The issue I had with git submodules is that my co-worker could not just pull a parent repository and just work on it without pulling explicitly the submodules also. With subtrees this complexity is gone. I can edit a shared library in any of the projects that are using it and push the commit to its remote repository. Then later in any other project that is using it I can make a pull request to have the library up-to-date. And my co-worker absolutely does not need to be aware of it for it to work.

But now I’m facing a situation that is a bit confusing, at least for me. I have a private repository for a library auth that is basically a set of helpers for authentication. I use it as a git subtree in multiple Elixir /Phoenix projects. So in my last project I have to deal multi-lingual content and I prefer that each application in the project handle the internationalization through its own Gettext backend. Then in my auth library I generate content in multiple languages for that project. But other projects that use this same library don’t necessary need those translations files.

So I’m wondering how to use .gitgnore files so that a parent git repository keep trace of a folder it generated inside a subtree repository, while the subtree repository should ignore that folder when pushing to its own remote repository. The folder in my case is the one that contains the Gettext translations. I can ignore the folder in the subtree repository, but is not it meaning that the main project repository will also follow that rule?

Most Liked

dimitarvp

dimitarvp

That’s exactly my point – now that I reread my post, it’s not clear, sorry. I meant put it on GitHub and don’t put on hex.pm indeed.

dimitarvp

dimitarvp

I’d rather not discuss Git submodules because I heard from several people that they are bad news. I haven’t used them so can’t comment.

In your case you might want to do two things:

  1. Self-host a private Hex repository.
  2. Put your common code there as a library.

I gathered from your post that you don’t want that common code to be public so this likely the solution you are looking for?

dimitarvp

dimitarvp

You are very wrongfully assuming that anyone even cares. :laughing:

Just do it, man. Make a common library, put it up publicly with a short note on what it does and how – don’t need to be detailed. Nobody guarantees any future readers they’ll find anything of use. The amount of abandoned projects out there is gigantic. Just don’t think about it and do it how it’s easiest on you. If that means a public repo, so be it.

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

Jase
Any opinions on the best platform for dev-friendly blogging?
New
Jase
Do they publish their stacks or is it mostly a case of guesswork? Twitter facebook instagram snapchat tiktok google et all. Used to be we...
New
AstonJ
This article got me thinking about encrypted chat: Europol said that French police had discovered some of EncroChat’s servers were lo...
New
New
AstonJ
Stopwords are words that you normally filter for things like search queries, such as ‘as’, ‘because’ etc - there are a few online, but I ...
New
Girtyp
Hi everyone. Getting right to my question, I have recently thought about implementing payment by installment feature in my website. Who k...
New
PaulMartin
Hey everyone! Do you have any tips or free resources that can help me learn Rspec? Although I know how to write some Rspec, I’m not very...
New
harwind
I have an array of objects in JavaScript, and I want to sort them based on a specific property of the objects. For example, I have an arr...
/js
New
harwind
I’m working on a web application where users can sign up with their email addresses. To ensure data integrity, I want to implement client...
/js
New
harwind
Hi, Take a riveting look at exception handling in Java programming, including the complicated dance between try-catch blocks, checked an...
New

Other popular topics Top

AstonJ
SpaceVim seems to be gaining in features and popularity and I just wondered how it compares with SpaceMacs in 2020 - anyone have any thou...
New
Rainer
My first contact with Erlang was about 2 years ago when I used RabbitMQ, which is written in Erlang, for my job. This made me curious and...
New
AstonJ
Just done a fresh install of macOS Big Sur and on installing Erlang I am getting: asdf install erlang 23.1.2 Configure failed. checking ...
New
Margaret
Hello content creators! Happy new year. What tech topics do you think will be the focus of 2021? My vote for one topic is ethics in tech...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Learn different ways of writing concurrent code in Elixir and increase your application's performance, without sacrificing scalability or...
New
AstonJ
Continuing the discussion from Thinking about learning Crystal, let’s discuss - I was wondering which languages don’t GC - maybe we can c...
New
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight: Karl Stolley @karlstolley Logic! Rhetoric! Prag! Wow, what a combination. In this spotlight, we sit down with Karl ...
New
New