Question

I need to work on someone’s dev(unused webhost) server to build their website on… The servers are not SSH enabled and because it’s shared hosting the company won’t let me edit the Apache configuration which would allow me to work with git through HTTPS…
My question is, since I cannot use git directly with the dev server, is it worth using locally and have two different locations of the website?
For example… normally you would connect to your dev server and work on that, every time you commit/push it goes right to the Dev server. In my case, it doesn’t go anywhere besides a private Github repo, because there’s not way I can use git with the dev server.
What would you guys do in this situation?

Answer 1

If you can’t use git on the server, then you can still copy files from your git repo the ordinary way. You probably don’t really need the entire git repo on the server anyway, just an up-to-date working copy.

Use rsync to copy files directly from a clean local repository to the target server. Make sure to exclude .git from the rsync operation.

If you don’t have rsync, use sftp.

If you don’t have sftp, then… something is seriously wrong.