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Ruby and Git Roundup: Rails, Rubyforge, APIs

by Werner Schuster on Apr 09, 2008 |

GitHub (InfoQ reported about GitHub before) seems to have caused a big change in the way Ruby projects handle their repositories, and might just turn into the killer application for Git. GitHub is implemented in Rails, and now the Rails project's repository is moving to GitHub.

However, Rails isn't alone in this move - a growing group of other Ruby projects is also moving to GitHub:

Other projects are mirrored at GitHub, such as Rubinius:
- Rubinius mirror at GitHub
- Official Rubinius Git repository instructions

To get a grip on Git and how to use it, a large list of tutorials and other documentation exists, eg.

And finally, the Pragmatic Programmers seem to have spotted the Git trend as well, as they've just announced "Pragmatic Version Control with Git', due in November 2008.

Other project hosting services are also adding Git support, such as RubyForge. RubyForge now offers Git as one of the choices among CVS and SVN. The best way to get up to speed with this is to use Dr. Nic's "Git for Rubyforge accounts".

Git is also used for other purposes than a source code repository. Two examples of projects using Git are GitWiki, a Wiki written in Ruby, using the web framework Sinatra. Git is used to store versions of the Wiki pages. Another similar project is Gibak, a backup system using Git by Mauricio Fernandez, written in Ocaml .

This style of using Git is already supported by a list of Ruby libraries to access Git. Grit allows to access Git repositories from Ruby code. Grit is the library GitHub uses to work with Git repositories.

Are you considering trying out Git? If not for your main repository, have you considered using Git locally, but SVN on the server with git-svn?