How I organize git repos locally

In this post I wanted to share how I manage / organize git repositories locally.

Why not everything in one directory?

Surely, you can put everything into one directory, say ~/code and call it a day, right? yes of course! But the issue arises when you have a lot of repositories across different git domains and organizations – this is especially true for your work computer where you will have tons of git repositories cloned.

For example, this is how many git repositories I have on my work laptop

Nice! I swear I did not do that on purpose

How I organize it

First of all, I do use a single parent directory for all my git repositories. Then I use the full path of the repository in the filesystem. That is, if my git repository is https://github.com/MansoorMajeed/some-cool-project then, on my laptop it will be located at ~/git/github.com/MansoorMajeed/some-cool-project

Similarly, if a company project is at ghe.company.com/myteam/some-legacy-code then it will be available at ~/git/ghe.company.com/myteam/some-legacy-code

But Why?

Avoid potential collisions

Especially when working across different orgs, there could be repos with the same name. This completely avoids that issue

Easily navigate among 100s of repos

Here is where this organization shines the best! Now I can use this alias to navigate any git repositories easily, from anywhere on my terminal. Here is the alias

gt () {
	if [[ $(uname -s) = "Linux" ]]; then
		gitpath='/home/mansoor/git/'
	else
		gitpath='/Users/mansoor/git/'
	fi
	repopath=$(find ${gitpath} -mindepth 3 -maxdepth 3 -type d | awk -F $gitpath '{print $2}' | fzf)
	if [ -n "$repopath" ]; then
		cd ${gitpath}${repopath} || echo "Failed to navigate to ${gitpath}${repopath}"
	else
		echo "No repository selected."
	fi
}

Now, I can simply type gt from anywhere in a terminal and start fuzzy typing the repo name I want to go to! Press Enter and I will be placed inside that

So, yeah! That is all. If you have any unique and efficient ways of managing it, please drop a comment! I am all ears