Meet grem. Short for gremlin, grem is a tool for managing local copies of github repos. Grem is also my first gem. It was remarkably easy to create a gem with newgem and push it to gemcutter.
Right now, all grem does is clone a repository to a default directory. To try it out, run
sudo gem install grem
…and then:
grem benatkin grem
…and grem will clone my grem repo to ~/github/benatkin/grem, creating directories as needed.
I got this idea from a comment on my earlier post, Organizing github repos, by KevBurnsJr, where he suggested making a bash script for cloning repos into my directory structure. I decided to take it a step further by making a gem, and adding more features later.
By the way, standardizing on ~/github/username/reponame has worked wonders for me. It’s lowered the friction for downloading repos, looking at them, and coming back to them later. This script should lower the friction even more.
Speaking of lowering friction, with Heroku‘s help, I deployed a mini-app. Check it out at http://last7.heroku.com/ (github).