gitautopush

Watch a local git repository for any changes and automatically push them to GitHub.

Useful as a live synchronization tool for teaching. Say you've got a Jupyter notebook (or a markdown file) that you are populating with code while you are teaching a class. As you add content to the file, you'd like students to have access to the "latest" version at any moment in time.

gitautopush lets you automatically track the latest changes to a git repository, and automatically push them to GitHub. You can then ask students to visit a GitHub or nbviewer link, and they will be able to see any changes that you've made.

See the GIF below for an example.

Installation

You can install with pip:

pip install gitautopush

Usage

First, make sure that you've got a GitHub repository cloned to a local folder.

Next, run gitautopush and point it to that folder:

gitautopush /path/to/my/repo/folder

gitautopush will begin watching this folder for any changes. When it finds them, it will commit them and push the folder contents to GitHub. It will also display some links that you can share with students to help them follow along.

Parameters

Below are parameters you can use to customize the behavior of Gitautopush.

• --sleep <INT> - the amount of time (in seconds) to wait in between attempts to synchronize.
• --path <STRING> - a path to the folder you'd like to watch and synchronize

Tutorial via an example use-case

Here's a common use-case for gitautopush:

You're teaching a Software Carpentry bootcamp and you'd like to do your work in a Jupyter Notebook. You have a "master copy" that you're working from, but you don't want to give the whole thing to students ahead of time. Your plan is to do your work in an empty notebook as students watch, and you'd like students to have access to the latest version of the notebook at all times.

First, you create an empty GitHub repository which we'll call gitautopush-demo. Next, we'll create a folder where we'll be doing our work:

Next, you clone this empty repository to your computer:

git clone https://github.com/choldgraf/gitautopush-demo

Now, run gitautopush and point it to the new folder. We'll tell it to sleep for 10 seconds after each check:

gitautopush --path ./gitautopush-demo --sleep 10

gitautopush will print a few useful links, and begin checking the folder for any changes. When it finds one, it will commit the change to the repository and push the result. It will also print an nbviewer link for any Jupyter notebook that is changed. You can share these links with your students.

Finally, open a new terminal window and use it to launch an application (e.g. Jupyter Lab, Jupyter Notbeook, or your own text editor) to edit the content.

As changes are made, note the links that are provided and share them with your students.

Acknowledgements

This tools was first thought up by John Lee, then adapted as a Python module by Chris Holdgraf.