Git on a Windows Lan

Question

My colleagues and I are thinking of giving git a try and see if we can easily move to it. We work on a Windows-only environment. On our own machines we already have git set up with mingw32 and SmartGit as gui client.

Is there an easy approach based more on the concept of sharing folders than on the concept of "hosting server"? For example, we wanted to host a git repository on a folder shared on the lan, clone it on our machines and see how to push our changes back to that folder, merge them and so on.

Our first problem was cloning from the lan. Of course git doesn't recognize paths like \\mymachine\shared\repo

How to start with our approach? Is to doable? Any advice?

Thanks in advance.

EDIT

As suggested, a command line approach worked. We also had to invert the slashes, so that git clone //machine/directory/repository did the trick. Now, my colleague had a local copy working, made some changes... How to push them back to the shared folder?

Push and Fetch work on local paths too, we're up and running with our tests. Thank you all!

Answer 1

For a pure command-line solution, did you try

 git clone file:///local/path/to/repo-name.git 

In your case:

 git clone file:///\\mymachine/shared/repo.git 

It should work just fine.

---

Update August 2014 (4 years later), Git 2.1

Commit c2369bd by Eric Sunshine and Cezary Zawadka (czawadka) means a simpler UNC path now work:

Windows: allow using UNC path for git repository

Eric Sunshine fixed mingw_offset_1st_component() to return consistently "foo" for UNC "//machine/share/foo", cf this thread.

So this should now work:

git clone //mymachine/shared/repo.git