Unison is a file synchronization tool that works across operating systems. It can sync in both directions and works for collections of directories and files.

I wanted to sync projects between my local machine and a dev machine reliably and simply. Using git to push to an origin and then pull from the other side wasn't simple enough.

Unison can power the synrconization, but I wanted some nice convenient way to run the syncronization steps for an entire project, even if I were in a subdirectory. I also wanted the location of the project on the other machine to be found automatically, so that I didn't need to think about paths and couldn't accidentally move files to the wrong location.

With that in mind, I decided that:

1. The project root is the same as the git root. The git project root can be found using: localProjectRoot=$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)
2. The location of the project on the remote dev-box should be specified in some configuration file. I decided to create a .remoteprojectroot file the project's (local) root directory: remoteProjectRoot=$(cat $localProjectRoot/.remoteroot)

I then created the following function which lets me run uni from anywhere within the project on my local machine, and have the project state synced to the remote dev-box.

uni() {
  host=<host>
  user=<user>
  localProjectRoot=$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)
  remoteProjectRoot=$(cat $localProjectRoot/.remoteroot)
  echo "Local Project Root: "$localProjectRoot
  echo "Remote Project Root: "$remoteProjectRoot
  unison -batch -color true $localProjectRoot ssh://$host@$user/$remoteProjectRoot
}

TODO:

1. Stop syncronization if remoteProjectRoot can't be found.