Git workflow for web development

Question

I have been playing around with git on my local machine and everything makes sense until it comes to a remote and multiple developers I start getting confused.

My goal i

Answer 1

Check out:

• Git for designers
• GitX, a graphical Git tool for OS X
• Capistrano for deployment

This should get everyone familiar with using git and give you a tool for efficiently pushing out changes.

Answer 2

Before going further, I'll state quite clearly that git is not a web deployment tool. Capistrano and friends are the superior solution, and mandatory for complex systems. However, if you have a simple enough site and don't care about atomic deployments, dependencies, forced process (ensuring all changes were QAed, etc), and the like, you can sometimes get away with a post-receive hook which does a forced git checkout. Then the process of deploying to a website would be to push to a special repository. You could either have one repository for QA and one for production, or have the hook check the branch being pushed to and figure it which to update that way.

See http://toroid.org/ams/git-website-howto for more information on a simple post-receive hook for automatic checkout.

Of course, you can also have the post-receive hook call an actual web deployment system to take care of some of the problems mentioned above.