Setting up Git for usage on a-Shell

One of the best apps I use on iPadOS is a-Shell. I always tried to use it with git, since I like more doing things in the command line than while doing them via Working Copy. Since a-Shell doesn’t use the standard Git implementation, I had to perform some modifications to a normal git workflow in order to use it. So here are the steps I took to clone a Github repository.

The .profile file

First thing I had to do was to kinda “replace” the lg2 command. As we use the .init file to run commands on the application’s startup, I’ve just added an alias command to the file, like the following:

alias git="lg2"

The thing is that even by using git instead of lg2, this open source implementation works very differently from the regular git.

For instance, when setting a custom path to my Github’s ssh key in general I use the GIT_SSH_COMMAND variable, but that isn’t picked automagically by lg2. By reading a lot here, I was able to figure out the steps (yes, plural) needed to clone a Github repository using my own key.

Setting up the private and public keys

So one of the things I do when storing my SSH keys is: I store only the private keys. In general, only these are needed. That’s not the case, unfortunately, with lg2.

When trying to clone the repository for this blog, for instance, I had to generate the public key from my private one in order to make it work.

With that information in mind, I had to perform the following command to generate the public counterpart:

ssh-keygen -f ~/Documents/ssh-keys/github.key -y > ~/Documents/ssh-keys/github.key.pub

Cloning a repository

To clone a repository from Github, we need to instantiate a git repository. Yeah, I know. So in this document I’ll be using this blog’s repository as an example.

First I had to create an empty folder and enter it:

mkdir 58wq && cd 58wq

Then init the repository (please do not give up, it’s gonna work in the end I promise LOL):

git init

Then set a few configuration parameters:

git config user.password ""
git config user.identityFile ~/Documents/ssh-keys/github.key
git config user.name my-name
git config user.email a.valid@email

Set the remote URL (I got it from Github’s “Code” button under the SSH tab):

git remote add origin git@github.com:marcocspc/58wq.git

Finally, “clone” the repository:

git pull

Now I could add this post to my blog. ^^

A few observations

The following doesn’t work:

git commit -a -m "something"

I need to (every time I perform a new commit):

git add * #or git add filename
git commit -m "something"

It may be needed to create the .ssh folder inside ~/Documents:

mkdir ~/Documents/.ssh

That should be it!