Organizing Code Across Macs
I’ve got a lot of code projects (around 50), and I develop on at least two machines - a Mac Mini at home for “personal” and consulting work, and a Macbook Pro for my primary employer.
I keep things separate, but there’s intentional overlap - for example, I use my personal dotfiles and githooks projects at work. “Toy” projects for exploring new concepts may start on the home machine, but carry over to the laptop for commuting.
Between all those projects for personal, work, and consulting use, I definitely need a system to keep track of the code. Here’s what I do.
Code Under Git Control
Every bit of code that I write is under git management. Even teeny weenie shell scripts go into a repo so that I can back out ill-advised changes days later.
Shared via GitHub
I push most new projects to GitHub to allow sharing between machines. I have very few private repos - I’m personally paying for only five right now, so my projects go private only when necessary. That’s a good discipline to have - the more people see your code, the better.
Once a project is on GitHub, sharing is trivial. push from one machine, pull onto another.
… and Only via GitHub
I know some devs keep their projects in Dropbox so that they’re “automagically” shared between projects, no git push / pull required. That doesn’t work for me - when I have both the belt of GitHub and the suspenders of Dropbox, I always get sloppy with the git commits. So I force myself to rely on git.
That said, there are bits of my development environment that I synchronize via Dropbox. For example, my Sublime Text 3 plugins are maintained in Dropbox, so that when I install a plugin on one machine, it’s waiting for me on the other.
Kept in a GitHub Organization Hierarchy
For awhile I kept all of my repos directly in $HOME/code. That became too unorganized, too fast.
Now, I keep all of my repos in $HOME/code/organization/projectname That makes a lot more sense.
- My personal projects are directories under
$HOME/code/bobgilmore/ - Employer’s projects are directories under
$HOME/code/my_employers_organization/ - Contract projects are in
$HOME/code/contract_org_1,$HOME/code/contract_org_2, and so on… - Copies of Thoughtbot repos are in
$HOME/code/thoughtbot
This all keep me sane, and lets me find projects whichever computer I’m on.