bare repositories

Due to popular demand, git-annex can now be used with bare repositories.

So, for example, you can stash a file away in the origin: git annex move mybigfile --to origin

Of course, for that to work, the bare repository has to be on a system with git-annex-shell installed. If "origin" is on GitWeb, you still can't use git-annex to store stuff there.

It took a while, but bare repositories are now supported exactly as well as non-bare repositories. Except for these caveats:

git annex fsck works in a bare repository, but does not display warnings about insufficient copies. To get those warnings, just run it in one of the non-bare checkouts.
git annex unused in a bare repository only knows about keys used in branches that have been pushed to the bare repository. So use it with care..
Commands that need a work tree, like git annex add won't work in a bare repository, of course.
However, you can (with recent versions of git-annex) run git annex copy, git annex get, and git annex move in a bare repository. These behave as if the --all option were used, and just operate on every single version of every single file that is present in the git repository history.

Here is a quick example of how to set this up, using origin as the remote name, and assuming ~/annex contains an annex:

On the server:

git init --bare bare-annex.git
cd bare-annex.git && git annex init origin

Now configure the remote and do the initial push:

cd ~/annex
git remote add origin example.com:bare-annex.git
git push origin master git-annex

Now git annex info should show the configured bare remote. If it does not, you may have to pull from the remote first (older versions of git-annex)

If you wish to configure git such that you can push/pull without arguments, set the upstream branch:

git branch master --set-upstream origin/master

How to convert bare repositories to non-bare

I made a repository bare and later wanted to convert it, this would have worked with just plain git:

cd bare-repo.git
mkdir .git
mv .??* * .git/
git config --unset core.bare
git reset --hard

But because git-annex uses different hashing directories under bare repositories all the files in the repo will point to files you don't have. Here's how you can fix that up assuming you're using a backend that assigns unique hashes based on file content (e.g. the SHA256 backend):

mv .git/annex/objects from-bare-repo
git annex add from-bare-repo
git rm -f from-bare-repo

Comment by https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawmraN_ldJplGunVGmnjjLN6jL9s9TrVMGE — Sun Nov 11 20:14:44 2012

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