Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Pullbox – A dead-simple dropbox alternative using Git

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 32 posts

Re: Show HN: Pullbox – A dead-simple dropbox alternative using Git

#6

Post by dantillberg »

Your story is very familiar to me, including trying and failing to use Dropbox due to terrible symlink-handling!

I built something similar recently [0] (also a bit like Sparkleshare, which I just learned about from another comment in this thread...), but for me I needed to sync all of my source code between multiple machines. You can't do that with stock git, but I was able to s/git/gut/gi to make "gut" (which uses .gut folders to store its own state and will happy gut-add files inside .git subfolders) and now I have a "~/work" folder on my laptop, on my desktop, and on a dev box on AWS, with all of my source code synced in real-time.

I also wrote much the same thing in Node and also in Python before rewriting (again) to Go. You can peruse my Python code at [1] if you're curious. I used plumbum (awesome library) for executing local/remote commands (makes it a bit simpler than using subprocess and calling ssh with shell commands). Also, you can use inotifywait with the "--monitor" option which makes it keep running when there are changes; you have to then parse out what changed, and make sure you handle state correctly, but that way you don't miss changes made while inotifywait starts back up again.

[0]: https://github.com/tillberg/gut

[1]: https://github.com/tillberg/gut/tree/0ce233d44f7f55448c15411...

Re: Show HN: Pullbox – A dead-simple dropbox alternative using Git

#8

Post by dantillberg »

bantunes wrote: post #5

Git is no good for binaries. And SparkleShare is dead. The proper alternative is SyncThing https://syncthing.net/ I have it on my home and work laptops, a NAS and a VPS and it just works brilliantly.

Awww, dammit. Why did I never hear of this before? I just spent like 400 hours building something equivalent but far less finished.

Syncthing has almost 10,000 stars, so it's not like others hadn't discovered it yet. Is there a way for me to browse all the popular repos on Github so I can see what other amazing things I've been missing? There's [0], but that just shows me an utterly useless view of all the repos I've starred.

[0]: https://github.com/stars?direction=desc&sort=stars

Re: Show HN: Pullbox – A dead-simple dropbox alternative using Git

#9

Post by prashanthellina »

dantillberg wrote: post #6

Your story is very familiar to me, including trying and failing to use Dropbox due to terrible symlink-handling! I built something similar recently [0] (also a bit like Sparkleshare, which I just learned about from another comment in this thread...), but for me I needed to sync all of my source code between multiple machines. You can't do that with stock git, but I was able to s/git/gut/gi to make "gut" (which uses .…

Very cool! I wish I'd found your repo before writing my implementation. In fact, I was going to rewrite mine in Golang to reduce memory consumption on my back-up server. I will take yours for a spin.

Re: Show HN: Pullbox – A dead-simple dropbox alternative using Git

#10

Post by prashanthellina »

tckr wrote: post #3

Did you had a look at Sparkleshare? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1424299

I tried using Sparkleshare. It was buggy and kept crashing after being unresponsive. When I checked the repo, I found that there wasn't much activity.
Post reply on HN