Dropbox as a True Git Server

25 Apr 2016 · 1 min read — shared on Hacker News and Reddit

git-remote-dropbox is now on PyPI! Get it with pip install git-remote-dropbox .

As far as I know, git-remote-dropbox is the only safe way to host a Git repository on Dropbox. Read about why here.

Once it’s installed, using Dropbox as a Git server is as simple as adding it as a remote: git remote add origin dropbox://path/to/repo . After that, it’s just the usual git pull and git push for interacting with the remote repo.

The coolest thing about this extension is that it makes Dropbox act as a true Git server that properly supports sharing.

I ran out of private GitHub repositories a long time ago, so I’ve been using git-remote-dropbox for personal projects and classwork, including group projects, for the last 8 months. It’s worked wonderfully, and I haven’t had any problems with it, so I’m comfortable with sharing it via PyPI now.

It used to take some effort to install the tool, but now it’s just a pip install git-remote-dropbox away. Setup involves getting an OAuth token from the Dropbox app console and putting it in ~/.git-remote-dropbox.json like:

{ "token" : "xxxxxxxx" }

More information is available on the project page.