hypergit

CLI for managing peer-to-peer git repositories

Install

npm i hypergit -g

Usage

USAGE: hypergit [command]

Commands:
  create        Create a hypergit repo.

  seed          Actively share all local repos with peers.

  fork          Create a new remote 'fork' of the current repo.

  web           Host local web frontend.

The hypergit cli lets you

manage hypergit remotes, and
lets you git clone hypergit://... URLs

What?

Just another git remote

hypergit wants to be a special git remote, like https://... or ssh://..., except instead of pointing to a specific (centralized) server somewhere on the internet, it points to a peer-to-peer-friendly database on your own computer. When you 'push' to a hypergit remote, you're writing your changes to a local hyperdb, which mirrors how git would lay itself out on the filesystem.

Why?

P2P sync & works offline

hyperdb's special power is the ability to sync itself with other peers over the internet and local network.

Creating a hypergit repo (hypergit create) adds a remote called swarm to your .git/config, and creates a new unique id (it's actually a public key) that identifies that new remote. Something like hypergit://ccc0940b5b13937e5b32ed48b412803d2d70caa18c3ec7ba385c77c204d70c94. When someone runs git clone hypergit://... or hypergit seed, the program will connect to a distributed hash table and find other peers who are interested in that identifier. The ID is hashed before you look for it, so users couldn't discover the repo without knowing the original key. Connections are opened to those peers and you exchange hyperdb state so that you both end up with the same resulting state.

From here you could do a git fetch swarm to pull down those latest changes. The cool thing is that since the remote lives on your local filesystem, you can do push and pull and fetch even while offline, and your changes will sync to the rest of the peers involved in this repo once you're online again. You can even peer with just other users on the same local network as you and collaborate in offline environments.

Data lives on the peers

This approach differs from federation, where users pick from a set of servers to host their git repositories. With hypergit all of the data lives on peers directly, so everyone with a laptop is a first-class citizen, and doesn't have to choose between hosted services that could go down at some point. By using hypergit seed you can, not unlike bittorrent, re-host git repos you like on servers and provide them greater availability.

What hypergit isn't

This isn't a github replacement. hypergit wants to be a powerful primitive that enables social peer-to-peer coding. There are many ways to do coding with other humans, and heavy opinions on that don't feel like they ought to be tied in with the lower level pieces.

Contributors

With hypergit, each project participant has their own hypergit repo. There is no "origin" central authority.

@noffle: hypergit://207dbaef657d688ad528573ae66b5a0bede40fcb82e6b91afc44ddd43c84874f
@wmhilton: hypergit://86b0753499e01564be180c4f5b8c7f53449bfc27753eb12fb97adf81838167ce

If you'd like your hypergit added, open a PR.

Other hypergits

@isomorphic-git: hypergit://5701a1c08ae15dba17e181b1a9a28bdfb8b95200d77a25be6051bb018e25439a