gitcache.md

This is a distillation of a technique we use internally at Basho to reduce the pain of cloning some of our larger repos. It relies a bit on shell scripts and environment variables, but it can be run more directly, as I show below.

1. Create a bare git repository in some directory, e.g. /var/lib/gitcache.

   git init --bare /var/lib/gitcache

2. Add all repositories you want to cache as remotes to the git repository, e.g.

   cd /var/lib/gitcache
   git remote add rails/rails git://github.com/rails/rails.git

3. Fetch all the remotes. This takes a while, and should be run periodically.

   git fetch --all

4. When cloning, refer to the cache repository:

   git clone --reference /var/lib/gitcache git://github.com/rails/rails.git

5. Now you have lightning-fast clones!