Git: application configuration and different environments

Question

We use git for most of the web applications we build in our shop, and though the applications themselves use a variety of technologies (PHP, Rails, etc), we generally have a sta

Answer 1

Not sure why people think they can get away without some sort of install tool. Git is about tracking source, not about deploying. You should still have a "make install"-type tool to go from your git repo to the actual deploy, and this tool might do various things like template expansion, or selection of alternate files.

For example, you might have "config.staging" and "config.production" checked in to git, and when you deploy to staging, the install tool selects "config.staging" to copy to "config". Or you might have a single "config.template" file, which will be templated to make "config" in the deploy.