Git serve: I would like it that simple

Question

Navigate into your project and start git-daemon with the following switches:

cd project
git daemon --reuseaddr --base-path=. --export-all --verbose

This tells git-daemon to serve up all projects inside the current directory (which I assume is the project directory containing the .git/ folder). It also tells it to re-use the same address if you shut it down and start it back up too fast.

You can put this into a batch script with an easy to remember name like "gitserve", so you don't need to type it all out again. As suggested in some of the comments, in recent versions of Git you can add an alias to the Git config:

[alias]
    serve = !git daemon --reuseaddr --verbose --base-path=. --export-all ./.git

Once that's done on the server (your Windows box), you can do:

git serve

git-daemon uses the git:// protocol for transport, so on the client (your Linux box), you would need to do:

git clone git://123.456.789.111/ project

Rather than write your own batch script, use gitjour. It knows how to start git daemon correctly and will broadcast the clone URL via mDNS so you can do gitjour show on the linux box and copy and paste.

Also a good article with an overview of gitjour and a number of other similar tools from Dr. Nic, What is *jour and why they are killer apps for RailsCamp08.

Currently using two aliases - serve and hub. Serve for read-only share and hub for read/write share:

[alias]
  serve = !git daemon --base-path=. --export-all --reuseaddr --informative-errors --verbose
  hub = !git daemon --base-path=. --export-all --enable=receive-pack --reuseaddr --informative-errors --verbose

Also, there is more detailed tutorial about sharing via git daemon: http://l.rw.rw/git-daemon .

If you just want to expose the repository with a web browser

git-instaweb

$ git instaweb -d apache2 --start
$ lynx localhost:1234