Git Architecture Question

Hi all,

I am new to Git and learning this powerful tool these days.

I have a simple question :-

I work on a project that has 3 different environments. dev, staging and production. dev is obviously the local git repo that all dev's work on. staging is where most of the development takes places on a daily basis. and production is where least development happens but we still do it because sometimes we have to fix things quickly directly on the production server.

So how should I set this up ?

2 branches staging and master (default) ?

How can I make it so that the staging branch gets deployed to a different folder on the server and the master branch gets deployed on a different folder ?

Once a week, we would merge all the staging work into production and make a release.

Any ideas ?

Anuj Gakhar www.anujgakhar.com www.anshconsulting.co.uk

Hi Anuj, i'm facing a similar problem at the moment. In my company we want to switch from CVS to Git and Ant to Maven/Hudson. We have a similar environment like you, Development, Testing and Production, and my plan at the moment is to have a development, testing and master branch. Every of these branches should represent the appropriate environment. Then I configure Hudson with 3 jobs, every job to build one of these branches and to deploy to a separete folder on our server. If the developers then create a new change in a feature branch, we would merge that feature branch into branch development for our internal tests, then later merge that into testing for our QA department if they say they want to test that change, and if they say it's ok, merge that change into master to deploy it in production environment. This workflow is though not in production use, we evaluate this and other workflows at the moment, so I don't have any experiences from daily work.

Cheers, Manuel

Anuj Gakhar <anuj.gakhar <at> gmail.com> writes:

I wouldn't use "master" for the production branch, I'd call it simply "production" (there's nothing special about master, except that it's the default when you start). However, it's quite easy to change it anytime. Especially, each developer may create their own private branches at will. When working on multiple topics concurrently you'll probably create multiple shared "staging" branches. It's all very fast and very easy to do.

You can control both the working tree directory and the git directory using environment variables (GIT_WORK_TREE and GIT_DIR), so it's easy, e.g.

cd stagingFolder; GIT_DIR=..../.git git checkout staging

You can use options like --git-dir instead, s. http://www.kernel.org/pub/ software/scm/git/docs/

It may be useful to have a single person responsible for this merging.