Question

I want to serve a website directly from a git repository. Obviously, this will make updating the live server very simple – and I’m able to switch back to a previous branch if I have problems with new code.

Are there any security issues?

Do I need to add any directives to apache?

Is there any non-secuity related issues else I should know about?

EDIT : See Kan’s answer below – and here is a directive to protect the .git folder as I want to set root folder at top level of the git repos

<Files ~ "^\.git">
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
</Files>

Answer 1

There is only one concern – the .git folder. But the git stores it in the repo root only. If you place your web-exposed folder as a subfolder of the repo, it will work great and doesn’t require any additional configuration. The file structure will be:

myProj -+
        +-- .git
        +-- www-files
        ...
        +-- someStuff

So, there is no problem at all to expose the www-files from a web server.

There is a great story of using the svn instead…