Git drupal:// URLs for projects and sandboxes

In a previous post, I showed an example of cloning a module that included this command: git clone drupal://drupalcs. But I neglected to explain how this worked. I'm not sure where I picked this up (it was probably from Sam Boyer), but by adding a few lines to your ~/.gitconfig makes checking out Drupal projects and sandboxes easier:

[url "ssh://[email protected]/project/"]
    insteadOf = "drupal:"
[url "ssh://[email protected]/sandbox/"]
    insteadOf = "drupalsand:"

This allows you to use drupal://PROJECT_NAME to identify a project (module, theme) git repository, and drupalsand://USER/NID to checkout a sandbox. For example, I can clone one of my sandbox projects with this command, executed at the command line:

$ git clone drupalsand://mbutcher/1356522
Cloning into 1356522...
remote: Counting objects: 988, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (466/466), done.
remote: Total 988 (delta 463), reused 878 (delta 404)
Receiving objects: 100% (988/988), 242.04 KiB | 354 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (463/463), done.
warning: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout.

Perhaps this sort of syntactic sugar isn't for everyone, but I find it to be a nice configuration short-cut.

Of course, there's no reason you need to restrict this to Drupal. If you frequently use other Git remote repositories, a similar convention can be used for generating shortcuts. I have such shortcuts for HP's internal repos. And it would be easy enough to create a scheme like that for GitHub or other hosted repo sites.

If you're the one who came up with this scheme, let me know. I feel bad for not being able to give due credit.