Can Git and iCloud Drive be effectively used together?

Question

In the same flavor as this question, are there any possible complications that can arise when using the two services together?

Answer 1

No, they shouldn’t be used together.

• Apple says “You shouldn’t store app folders, libraries, or .tmp files in iCloud Drive.” .git is an app folder.
• There is a list of filenames excluded by iCloud Drive that git doesn’t avoid. So, for example, if you name a tag “tmp”, that tag won’t be synced. There’s also nothing stopping git modifying its internal file structure, or iCloud Drive modifying its exclusion list, such that this sync failure always occurs.
• iCloud Drive ignores symlinks, git doesn’t. So, git status may return different results on different computers that iCloud Drive is done syncing.

More broadly speaking, git and iCloud Drive are two different lossy implementations of “what are the contents of this directory”, one shouldn’t expect them to be equivalent.

Answer 2

Be careful especially if you enable the Optimised storage feature, where not all files in iCloud Drive are stored locally and may instead be requested on-demand.

From my tests, it appears git doesn't trigger the OS to request the file, and instead picks up the placeholder file, named something like .original_filename.icloud.