Question

We are in the process of moving our Drupal 6 sites into Git. I noticed that Drupal 7 actually comes with a default .gitignore file which ignores the settings.php file and the sites/default/files directory. So I am assuming this is standard practice and that I should not version control the files directory. My question is though, what is the best method to move these files through the migration process from dev to test to live then? The live site may contain a ton of images in that directory that people have uploaded on the live site, but then the directory on the DEV server would have new images that some of the developers might have added to content they’ve created. Currently, when a content editor adds content in the way of a page node for example on the dev site, we have a WYSIWYG editor that allows them to upload an image that ends up in /sites/default/files/images and gets placed in their content. What is the easiest way to sync this files directory between the various servers?

Thanks

Answer 1

Based on the response to @Brian’s answer above, the asker really has two questions:

1. Why shouldn’t I include the files directory in source control
2. Does the Deploy module support images uploaded by IMCE

#1, Reasons why you shouldn’t include the files directory in source control:

• @Brian gives reason #1 above, but it sounds like you do, in fact, push data from dev to prod.
• The files directory isn’t well suited to source control. (Rarely do you want to revert or view commit history for the files directory)
• The files directory can grow huge, which might become a repo storage problem
• I usually symlink the files directory outside of the drupal install so I don’t need to move it if the server path changes (again, because it can be huge)
• Many of the files in the files directory are likely to be derivatives of other files (in the case of image cache). Even if you were to justify putting the files directory under source control, it doesn’t make sense to keep track of /files/img.png and /files/imagecache/small/img.png.

#2, Deploy module support for images:
The short answer is no; Deploy does not support images uploaded by IMCE for D6. See: Add IMCE image support.

But sarjeet.singh provides a patch for D7 in the issue linked to above. Given that the file directory paths are identical on dev/prod, you should be able to adapt it for Drupal 6.