How To Use A Local Repo As A Git Remote

This article is about how to create and use a local git repo as a remote. The use case I’m using this for is for secure SSL certificate storage. We don’t want to store SSL certificates on a vendor site such as gitlab. But we do need the certs available for our Ansible workflow to deploy them and we want to track them. So the repos sit on a secure server NFS share that’s only accessible by the Ansible script.

# create repo (this will be the remote)
mkdir repo.git
cd repo.git

# initiate bare repo
git --bare init

# create master folder -- repeat this for other branches
cd ../
mkdir master
git clone ../repo.git .
git checkout -b master
git touch readme.md
git add -A
git commit -a -m "initial commit"
git push -u origin master

You remote URL would be PATH_TO_REPO/repo.git. You would be able to clone the repo anywhere locally by running git clone PATH_TO_REPO/repo.git. If the repo.git directory is mounded to an NFS share, then you would be able to access it by the URL of the NFS share.