Turning Your Local Git Repo Into a Remote

Need to pull some changes from a friend’s local Git repo without having to push to origin? This post will show you how to do that.

You can access a local Git repo using SSH, but setting up keys and such will probably take some time. For a quick-and-dirty solution, HTTP is much easier.

On the machine you want to use as the server, navigate to your project and then into the .git directory.

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$ cd /path/to/project
$ cd .git

Stand up a HTTP server using Python’s SimpleHTTPServer module. You can use any port number you like.

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$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 5000

You’ll need the IP address of this machine as well. (Use ifconfig)

Make sure you can access the python server from a browser on the client machine. You should be able to see something like this at https://ip.address:5000/

On the client, you should be now able to access the git repo over HTTP as though it were a normal git remote.

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$ git ls-remote https://ip.address:5000
$ git pull https://ip.address:5000 master

Add it as a remote to avoid typing out the entire IP each time.

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$ git remote add https://ip.address:5000 local-foo
$ git pull local-foo master