[_odey]

Once upon a time I worked at an outsourcing company called Endava, in Bucharest. I was one of the "benched" engineers (basically hired as an Erlang engineer and kept around without work to be available once the client needed me, so I could jump in immediately; this is how they operate).

One of the guys I had lunch with, outside of my project's team (the aquarium as it was known) told me the story, that they had a new project, the client gave them the archive of the code, but even though they requested Gitlab access, they have not received anything for 2 weeks and they were tired of copy pasting files in between their laptops.

What I did was to install a Linux VM on one of their laptops, set up a bare git repository in there, showed how to use the domain name associated with their laptop on the internal network as a git remote, and have them use it as a "local" git setup. They loved it!

I'm really proud of that moment :)

EDIT: this might not be 100% local, and you still technically have a server (the VM), but is close I think. I do use a local git with a bare repo in my ~ that is backed up to a USB stick for throwaway projects sometimes.