I have been working for some years with svn and I was happy with it. But I have to admit that git is very cool as well and I started using it a couple months ago. No regrets till now :)

In this post I don’t want to list pros or cons of git versus svn or viceversa but I’d like to share a very simple worflow I’ve adopted to manage my live and dev environments and to keep them in sync through git.

Setup

Live Server

You need to create a bare repository (that we called newrepo.git) somewhere in your live server. I’m assuming that the /var/git/repo directory has been previously created.

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cd /var/git/repo
mkdir newrepo.git
cd newrepo.git
git init --bare

As second step, you should clone the newrepo.git to your webserver root directory, assuming this repo will contain the website files you are working on.

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cd /var/www
git clone /var/git/repo/newrepo.git newsite

Development Server

On your development server, you have to clone the same repository newrepo.git. It is worth to note that the clone has been added the remote url automatically since you are cloning through ssh protocol.

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cd /var/www
git clone ssh://myuser@myliveserver.com/var/git/repo/newrepo.git newsite

Deploy local changes

Development Server

First of all, you should to prevent web access to the .git directory (differently from svn, it exitsts only at your clone root) by creating a .htaccess file at the same level of .git folder.

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cd /var/www/newsite
touch .htaccess

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# deny access to the top-level git repository:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule \.git - [F,L]

Now add your first extra-complicated index file :)

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echo 'Hello World!' >> index.html

And sync the changes with your local repository.

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git add .
git commit -m ".git folder protected from web access"

Last step consists of pushing local changes to the remote repository (with ‘remote repository’ I mean the one on live-server at /var/git/repo/newrepo.git path).

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git push origin master

Live Server

Finally, pull down changes from the newrepo.git repository to the clone in your web server root directory.

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cd /var/www/newsite
git pull origin master