Post Receive Git Hook to Push to Github

I self-host my own git repositories. I also use github as a backup for many of them. I have a use case for a number of them where the data changes can be quite large and pushing to both my own and github's remote services doubles my bandwidth usage in my mostly bandwidth contrained environments.

To get around those contraints, I wanted to only push to my git repository and have that service then push to github. This is how I went about it, courtesy of Matt Palmer

Assumptions:

• You have your own git server
• You have a github account
• You're fairly familiar with git

Authentication

It's likely you have not used your remote server to connect to github. To make sure everything happens smoothly, you need to:

• Add the SSH key for your user account on your server to the authorised keys on your github account
• SSH just once from your server to github to accept the key from github.

Add a Remote for github

In the bare git repository on your server, you need to add the remote configuration. On a Debian server using gitweb, this file would be located as /var/cache/git/MYREPO/config. Add the below lines to it:

[remote "github"]
    url = git@github.com:MYACCOUNT/MYREPO.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/github/*
    autopush = true

Add a post-receive Hook

Now we need to create a post-receive hook to process the push to github. Going with the previous example, edit /var/cache/git/MYREPO/hooks/post-receive

#!/bin/bash

for remote in $(git remote); do
        if [ "$(git config "remote.${remote}.autopush")" = "true" ]; then
                git push "$remote"
        fi
done

Happy automated pushing to github.