If you’re working on a pet project and aren’t quite ready to share it with the world via GitHub, here’s a handy way you can backup your work to the cloud using Dropbox as a git remote:

  1. Create a new, empty folder in your Dropbox to house your project’s remote:
$ mkdir /path/to/Dropbox/gitremotes/yourproject
  1. Initialise a bare git repository in this newly created folder:
$ git init --bare /path/to/Dropbox/gitremotes/yourproject

NB A bare repository in Git is one that only contains the revision info and system files (the files you’d normally find in the hidden .git directory), and doesn’t contain the working tree. From Git version 1.7.0 and onwards, a repository has to be a bare repository in order to accept a push, so we must create our Dropbox remote as a bare repository.

  1. Add our new remote to our project:
$ git remote add dropbox /path/to/Dropbox/gitremotes/yourproject
  1. Push our work to our dropbox remote:
$ git push dropbox master

You can then interact with your Dropbox remote the same way you would with any other.