Question

I’m currently trying to follow the small project based work-group mentioned in the Pro Git book : http://progit.org/book/ch5-2.html

So, here’s my set-up:

[Live Website Folder] 
|             |
|             |
Developer1    Developer2

The way that I achieved that was I did the following:

1. git init –shared=0777
2. git clone /live/website developer1
3. git clone /live/website developer2

I was able to successfully clone my project and I went into developer1 folder. Here I make changes to my file index.html. Once, I make these changes, I do:

git add index.html
git commit -m 'Modified index.html --developer1'
git push

Now when I go to my /live/website directory and do a git status, it correctly tells me that the file index.html is modified. When I do:

git add index.html
git commit -m 'Modified index.html by developer1' 

It successfully makes the commit, but when I try to vi index.html, the file that I see is the original/un-modified one. I don’t see the changes made by developer1, within that file. Is this expected behavior?

Answer 1

What git status is telling you is that index.html is different to what is in the git index.

After you push, your /live/website repo contains the updated index.html in the index, but the old index.html in the working copy. You need to do git reset --hard HEAD followed by git checkout -f inside /live/website to reset the working copy to the same as the HEAD commit.

I’d suggest that you modify your setup slightly. Add a staging repository that is bare and push changes into that. Add a post-update hook that runs git pull staging master inside /live/website. This will ensure that the live website gets updated as soon as a commit is pushed in.

In glorious ascii art:

 /live/website
       |
       |
/path/to/staging (bare)
  |          |
  |          |
dev1        dev2

EDIT: Updated to correct command sequence for fixing the working copy.