git-annex/doc/walkthrough/syncing.mdwn
Joey Hess 5df89d58c7
git-annex pull and push
Split out two new commands, git-annex pull and git-annex push. Those plus a
git commit are equivilant to git-annex sync.

In a sense, git-annex sync conflates 3 things, and it would have been
better to have push and pull from the beginning and not sync. Although
note that git-annex sync --content is faster than a pull followed by a
push, because it only has to walk the tree once, look at preferred
content once, etc. So there is some value in git-annex sync in speed, as
well as user convenience.

And it would be hard to split out pull and push from sync, as far as the
implementaton goes. The implementation inside sync was easy, just adjust
SyncOptions so it does the right thing.

Note that the new commands default to syncing content, unless
annex.synccontent is explicitly set to false. I'd like sync to also do
that, but that's a hard transition to make. As a start to that
transition, I added a note to git-annex-sync.mdwn that it may start to
do so in a future version of git-annex. But a real transition would
necessarily involve displaying warnings when sync is used without
--content, and time.

Sponsored-by: Kevin Mueller on Patreon
2023-05-16 16:51:07 -04:00

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Markdown

Notice that in the [[previous example|getting_file_content]], `git annex
sync` was used. This lets git-annex know what has changed in the other
repositories like the laptop, and so it knows about the files present there and can
get them.
Let's look at what the sync command does in more detail:
$ cd /media/usb/annex
$ git annex sync
commit
nothing to commit (working directory clean)
ok
pull laptop
ok
push laptop
ok
After you run sync, the git repository will be updated with all changes
made to its remotes, and any changes in the git repository will be pushed
out to its remotes, where a sync will get them. This is especially useful
when using git in a distributed fashion, without a [[central bare
repository|tips/centralized_git_repository_tutorial]]. See [[sync]] for
details.
By default `git annex sync` only syncs the metadata about your
files that is stored in git. It does not sync the contents of annexed
files, that are managed by git-annex. To do that, you can use
`git annex sync --content`
There are also commands `git-annex pull` and `git-annex push` that are like
`git-annex sync`, but only transfer in one direction, do not commit, and
operate on the content of annexed files by default.