Transport protocols

In general, URLs in the configuration of remote contain information about the transport protocol, the address of the remote server (if any), and the path to the repository. Sometimes, the server that provides access to the remote repository supports various transport protocols; you need to select which one to use. This section is intended to help with this choice.

Local transport

If the other repository is on the same local filesystem, you can use the following syntaxes for specifying the URL:

/path/to/repo.git/
file:///path/to/repo.git/

The former implies the --local option to the Git clone, which bypasses the smart Git-aware mechanism and simply makes a copy (or a hardlink for immutable files under .git/objects, though you can avoid this with the --no-hardlinks option); the latter is slower but can be used to get a clean copy of a repository.

This is a nice option for quickly grabbing work from someone else's working repository, or for sharing work using a shared filesystem...