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Tutorial
Using the gin command line client requires an active gin account. You can register by visiting the GIN website.
Basic usage help is included in the command line and can be printed by typing
gin --help
Extended descriptions of all commands can be printed by typing
gin cmdhelp
This is an quickstart tutorial. It explains a common workflow that one might go through when using the client. For more detailed descriptions of what each command is doing, read the next section.
Assuming you have registered with the GIN services, you can login from the command line using:
gin login
The command will prompt you for a username and password. If entered correctly, you will be greeted with a confirmation message.
Before uploading any files, you must first create a repository on the server.
You can do this using the gin create command.
gin create tutorial
In this example, tutorial is the name of the repository.
Repository names must be unique for a user (i.e., a single user cannot have two repositories with the same name) and the full name of a repository is the name of the user who created it, along with the repository name, separated by a /.
For example, if user user has a repository called tutorial, the full repository name is user/tutorial.
Once the repository is created on the server, it's time to download the (empty) new repository and initialise the directory local directory that we will use to upload and download data.
As mentioned above, for the tutorial we are assuming the username is user and the repository name is tutorial.
The gin get command requires us to specify the full name of the repository.
gin get user/tutorial
This will create a directory called tutorial under the directory that you are working in.
Note that the command will fail with an error if a directory called tutorial already exists.
Following this, all upload and download commands should be entered from within the repository's directory.
cd tutorial
Copy some data files, or source code into the tutorial directory using any method you like.
To upload the files that are now inside the tutorial directory, simply issue the upload command.
gin upload
This will "commit" your changes, in other words, it will detect the new files in the directory, add them to the repository, and start uploading to the GIN server.
Every time you perform a gin upload the changes are saved and uploaded and a "checkpoint" is made of your data.
See the notes below on details regarding checkpoints.
Note that "upload" here doesn't only mean sending new files and changes to the server.
This command sends all changes made in the directory to the server, including deletions, renames, etc.
Therefore, if you delete files from the directory on your computer and perform a gin upload, the deletion will also be "uploaded", so to speak, and the file will be removed from the server as well.
If changes are made to your data elsewhere, for example on another computer, or from another user that you share your data with, you can download these changes by typing the download command from within the repository.
gin download
A more advanced tutorial with explanation of the internals of the client is being prepared and will be available soon.