Question

I’m setting up a general git deployment environment and I’m wondering if it’s safe to set up a symlink to a .git directory? By doing so, I’m hoping to be able to have seperate checkouts from the same repo without having to have to local copies of the history of a potentially large project.

Reasoning (pseudo-flow):

• web interface:
  • click “Deploy this commit to this server”
• server:
  • ln -s ./deploy/.git ./build/.git
  • cd build
  • git fetch
  • git checkout some_commit
  • make
  • if success:
    • cd ..
    • mv build deploy
    • make deploy // just reset nginx, apache, etc
  • if failure
    • alert user
    • wipe build directory, no harm done

Answer 1

Check out git-new-workdir, a tool purpose-built for checking out multiple working directories from one .git directory.