无需使用git（hub）1个编码器+ 1个webdesigner的本地开发服务器即可进行Web应用程序开发的工作流程

Question

I am a programmer and in near future I am going to work together with a web/template designer on several projects. What do you think about my development workflow setup? Do you have any optimization tips?

Setup for one specific project

• The whole project is hosted on github.
• The project is a complex webapplication running on a linux os (It's impossible to run it on a local development-server, neither on windows nor on mac).
• There are 2 branches: dev and master. dev is the testing server and master is the productive server.
• Besides from the main github repository there is a local repository on the designer's computer, one on my computer, one on the testserver and one on the production server.
• I develop locally (on Windows). While developing there is a auto-sync script that automatically uploads all files I edit via FTP to the testing server, so I can check instantly if my changes work.
• The designer also develops locally (on Mac), he will also have an auto-sync script that automatically uploads all his changes to the testserver via FTP, but he has just access to a special "layout"-directory where all templates and static files (images, css, js, ...) are located. He also needs to check every few minutes if his changes or new features work.
• Whenever the designer or me sucessfully finished and tested a new feature on the testserver we then push our changes from the local dev-branch to the remote dev-branch on github. The testing server is not touched by git so far.
• Everyday in the morning there is a cronjob, that deletes the whole testserver directory and then does a "git clone" of the dev-branch of the remote repository hosted on github. That way the testserver has all new commits.
• The designer and me have to "git pull" the newest updates of each other using the remote github repository every morning before any further development.
• As soon as a feature runs well on the testserver I will merge the "dev" branch to "master" and commit the master to github.
• Then we have a deployment that pulls the master branch from github to the production server.

Questions

How do you generally handle the situation where you cannot have local development-servers for each project-member (because the application is not able run locally)? It seems really unprofessional to have one testserver where everybody can upload files via ftp to try their stuff, because it can easily happen that someone overwrites someone elses files so testing will fail. Is there a best-practice example of how to develop in a team when there is no local testing server?

Thanks in advance for you help and sorry about my english, its not my native language.

Answer 1

Git is a distributed version control system, so it works best when everyone who is working on the project has their own development environment in which they can work with. I don't personally recommend using Git for a project where you are actually testing the app on a single server. I recommend that you use a centralized version control system like Subversion . Unfortunately by using subversion you won't be able to host the repository on Github (you'd have to use a system like Git-SVN which would get a bit complex)

Answer 2

I would do this the following way:

1. Central repo hosted on github
2. Each team member has a local virtual machine running, managed by Vagrant .
3. There is a staging/testing server this sits at the HEAD of the dev branch.
4. There is a production server this sits at the HEAD of the master branch.

When ever you start work on a new feature you make a branch based on master. Once it is working as expected on your local machine you can commit it and merge it into dev and push to github. Its usually good to have a hook that updates the test server each time new code is pushed.

Once the feature has passed testing you could merge the feature branch into master and push that to your production environment.

If you want to fomalise the process around creating features, merging to branches and doing tagged releases etc then git-flow is a good option.