![]() ![]() For example, the open source service is a Git hosting service like GitHub and GitLab, but unique enough to prove SparkleShare's flexibility. SparkleShare can use any Git repository you can access for storage, so if you have or create an account with GitLab or any other hosting service, it can become the backend for your SparkleShare. You have three options: hosted Git, self-hosted Git, or self-hosted SparkleShare. ![]() ![]() If you don't have a Git repository to sync a folder with yet, you must create one before launching SparkleShare. You run SparkleShare on your computer to communicate with a Git repository-SparkleShare doesn't store your data. SparkleShare isn't software-as-a-service (SaaS). $ sudo flatpak install flathub Creating a Git repository For Linux, there's a Flatpak in your software installer, or you can run these commands in a terminal: $ sudo flatpak remote-add flathub SparkleShare is cross-platform, with installers for Windows and Mac available from its website. ![]() This somewhat limits the usefulness of SparkleShare for some people, but it makes it ideal for many workflows, including calendaring. Git certainly has the capability to store large files of binary data but it is designed to track history, so once a file is added to it, it's nearly impossible to completely remove it. Just as you get all the benefits of Git, you also get all the usual Git restrictions: It's impractical to use SparkleShare to store hundreds of photos and music and videos because Git is designed and optimized for text. Furthermore, because it's basically just a frontend to Git, you can access your SparkleShare files on devices that may not have a SparkleShare client but do have Git clients. It can be entirely self-hosted, or you can use it with Git hosting services like GitLab, GitHub, Bitbucket, and others. Because it is based on Git, you get fast, diff-based pushes and pulls, and you inherit all the benefits of Git version control and backend infrastructure (like Git hooks). It automates all Git commands, triggering the add, commit, push, and pull processes with the simple act of dragging-and-dropping a file into a specially designated SparkleShare directory. The SparkleShare project is a cross-platform, open source, Dropbox-style file sharing application based on Git. Computers are meant to make life easy, and computers are good at repetitious tasks, and so there are easier ways to share files with Git. Still, for some people, the idea of entering a command into their computer at all is confusing or bothersome. It varies from user to user, but the common incantation when sitting down to get some work done is just git pull or maybe the slightly more complex git pull & git checkout -b my-branch. Even if you're sharing a repository just with other computers on your own network, Git brings transparency to the act of getting files from a shared location.Īs interfaces go, Git is pretty simple. One of the nice things about Git is that it's inherently distributed. Today, we'll look at SparkleShare, which uses Git as the backbone for file sharing. In this series leading up to Git's 14th anniversary on April 7, we'll share seven little-known ways to use Git. While it's best-known for tracking source code changes in software development, it has many other uses that can make your life easier and more organized. Git is one of those rare applications that has managed to encapsulate so much of modern computing into one program that it ends up serving as the computational engine for many other applications. ![]()
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