Push contents of a read-only file system to remote git repo

Question

I have on system A a (remote, read-only mounted from server B via sftp/sshfs) filesystem with data on it that needs to be pushed to a remote git repository regularly.

I was not able to find a git command that just takes the contents of a directory (and its subdirectories) and pushes it to a remote repository, without turning the local directory into a repository itself (which would require writing into the locally mounted read-only directory).

One could maybe put an overlayfs on top of the remote directory's mountpoint on server A but I read that changes on lowerdir (which will happen on server B) could occasionaly cause issues with stale file handles which in turn can sometimes only be fixed by rebooting the machine (A).

Due to the large amount of data that needs to be pushed, temporarily copying it to the local machine A and git-pushing from there is not an option.

EDIT: The files are hosted on server B in a restricted network with no access to the git repository.

Answer 1

Git cannot push the contents of a directory to a remote server without having some sort of repository to store the data in. However, if you want to store the Git directory on a different disk or partition, you can do so.

To do that, you can set the environment variable GIT_DIR to point to the directory you'd like to use instead of .git and GIT_WORK_TREE to point to directory you'd like to use as your working tree (which would be the directory with the data you want to commit). You can then run Git commands as normal, including git init to initialize the repository, git add and git commit, and so on.

However, this will result in objects being written to the local system, which will take some disk space, even though they'll be compressed. That will probably be substantially less than the working tree, though. If that amount of disk space is too much, then unfortunately there's no way to do what you want to do, and you'll have to adopt a different approach.