Question

I can’ get my head around this process, so a little help is appreciated:

we want to make changes to our magento website. this happens on a development server. right now, without github, we rsync the live server, adjust /app/etc/local.xml, the mysql tables, make changes, rsync them back.

now we want to use github. we created an origin master repo from the live server. it has the recommended .gitignore file for magento, slightly modified for our purpose.

now the problem:

when we create a branch for the development server and clone this branch to the development server, all files in .gitignore don’t end up on the development server and the website is only half complete.

how do we tackle this problem? by hand with rsync?

PAT

Answer 1

Things like database configs and cache folder should be in your .gitignore for good reason, you don’t want to be committing and passing around copies of your login details between servers. Some aspects of the web app have to be static to an environment.

What you could look into is phing or some other build tools to execute certain functions and “build” your website. Instead of executing a git pull you’d execute phing and it will do all sorts of things for you like git pull, clear out cache directories and symlink in existing config files. It will take some learning the configs but will be worth it when you can do all the steps you mentioned above in one quick swoop.