A dear [[wishlist]] which would resolve [[this question|forum/ikiwiki_and_big_files]]: ikiwiki should support git-annex repositories.

I am not sure how this would work, but from my POV, it should do a `git annex get` when new commits are pushed to its bare repo. This would assume, of course, that there's another repo somewhere that ikiwiki has access to, which works for HTTP-style remotes, but could be more problematic for SSH remotes that require a key.

Another solution would be to make ikiwiki a remote itself and allow users to push big files to it. The only problem I see with this is those files would end up in the bare repository and not necessarily show up in the web rendering. Ideally, a big file pushed would be hardlinked between the two repos, but it seems [git-annex doesn't support that yet](http://git-annex.branchable.com/todo/wishlist:_use_hardlinks_for_local_clones). --[[anarcat]]

> One technical problem with this is that ikiwiki doesn't allow symlinks
> for [[security]], but git-annex relies on symlinks (unless you're in
> direct mode, but I'm not sure that's really desirable here).
> I'd like to make symlinks possible without compromising security,
> but it'll be necessary to be quite careful. --[[smcv]]

First implementation
====================

So as the [[discussion]] shows, it seems it's perfectly possible to actually do this! There's this [gallery site](http://stockholm.kalleswork.net) which uses the [[plugins/contrib/album]] plugin and git-annex to manage its files.

The crucial steps are:

 1. setup a git annex remote in `$srcdir`

    cd $srcdir
    git annex init

 2. make the bare repository (the remote of `$srcdir`) ignored by git-annex:

    cd $srcdir
    git config remote.origin.annex-ignore true
    git config remote.origin.annex-sync false

    (!) This needs to be done on *ANY* clone of the repository, which is annoying, but it's important because we don't want to see git-annex stuff in the bare repo. (why?)

 3. enable direct mode on `$srcdir` because ikiwiki ignores symlinks for [[security]] reasons:

    cd $srcdir
    git annex direct

This assumes you know what `srcdir`, `repository` and so on mean, if you forgot (like me), see this reference: [[rcs/git/]].

What remains to be clarified:

 * how do files get pushed to the `$srcdir`? Only through the web interface?
 * why do we ignore the bare repository?

See the [[discussion]] for a followup on that. --[[anarcat]]