I’m working on a project with others for developing a web-portal. The question I have has nothing to do with the matters of web programming but I need some input how to organize such a project efficiently.
Currently, our infrastructure for web development consists of two server: a dev- and a live-system. We work on the dev-system and test our new features there and then move everything to the live-system. Therefore we use git but in a rather unintended manner, I think. Everyone is working on the same local repository, so that changes can be viewed on the server immediately. It’s essential that we can see, what we are doing and since we have only one dev-server, we cannot have our own local repositories. Complete features are pushed to a global repository so that we can pull them to the live-system. The problem now occurs naturally when multiple people are working on the portal at the same time. Since we’re using different branches, so that the code isn’t scrambled, the files we are working on aren’t always up to date. Furthermore if someone switches the to the branch he is working on, I have to switch back so that I can see, what I’m currently doing. All this switching branches and not-up-to-date code isn’t funny at all.
I hope you understand where the problem lies. I see the only solution in setting up local servers for everyone working on the project, which seems not to be an ideal solution because there are so many factors which make that pretty difficult (e.g. several special server plugins). Does anyone know a better way to overcome these problems, or maybe a best practice for that?
I really, really would recommend trying to find a way to install the servers on all the developer’s own machines.
It is by far the most ideal solution.
However, I can think of one alternative:
You could try setting up multiple working directories on the server. Configure them as subdomains or vhosts or something.
This way, each developer would have their own workspace, but the development would still happen on the server, where the other resources could be shared.
This however does not solve all possible issues which can arise, but perhaps it would work as a temporary measure until you can find a way to set up each developer with the system.
As an idea for setting up the dev system on each developers own machine, you could consider creating a virtual machine image of your development server. This way you could simply copy the VM image around, with everything set up already and the devs would only need to run it.