Question

The structure I’m trying to setup is as follows:

• /public_html repository (“live”) what the users see, contains custom
  uploaded files (e.g. user gallery images, etc, these are ignored with .gitignore)

• /stable repository containing the latest stable source for the project (minus the ignored files)

• /public_html/dev development environment, where only myself and another developer will edit files in, test online directly from this folder.

Whenever any changes are made, they are done so in the /dev repository, and changes are pushed up to /stable which I would like to create a hook to automatically update the /public_html repository with the latest stable files.

Development area

As I understand git development is usually cloned and done in a local environment, but due to licensing restrictions on the software we use, and it requiring a very specific server setup, doing local development is not an option. We therefore need to have a central development area to test changes.

My questions are as follows:

1. How could I achieve the above structure?
2. What needs to be a base repository and what does not (as I understand push to a non-base repository can be troublesome.)
3. Any improvements/suggestions?

Answer 1

/stable should be a bare repository.

/public_html should not be a repository at all – instead, you should use git archive or similar in your hook to export files from the /stable repository into /public_html.

Ideally, I’d suggest not putting your dev repository in /public_html – it’d be better off in a separate document root of its own, that way you don’t run into potential issues from path collisions etc.