[support] Using Git for Site Building

[sebastian]

Hi Rolf,

Drupal is just a pain when it comes to merging DB changes from local to 
production.

I use Features [incl Strong arm] and some other modules [Block export] 
to try and have a handle on that; but I'm certainly open to other 
recommendations.

For continually changing websites I've often found that its easier to 
check what is changing on production [say comments, node_count and new 
nodes of X type] and to then script those changes into the development 
environment as a test-merge in a staging environment, and then move the 
[successfully] merged code to production once the problems are ironed out.

There are also DB change recording tools for Drupal, but the problem is 
you often don't know yet what the "final" state of something is when you 
are still building it.

Or you have to do all your DB changes in code, instead of using the 
GUI... and never use the GUI at all.

When I said that I do DB backups, I meant that as a solution to LOCAL 
cahnges [like before updating my Drupal release version from D6.20 to 
D6.22] but if you are instead trying to track changes from DEV to 
PRODUCTION you clearly have a very different issue that you are trying 
to address.

SVN's don't really play much of a part anymore, unless you are using the 
SVC to track user files and such...

Best,

Sebastian.

On 2011-10-28 4:41 PM, Rolf Kutz wrote:
> Hi Sebastian,
>
> On 25/10/11 19:13 +0700, sebastian wrote:
>> For the database I do dumps, which are in my SVC so I can also roll back
>> to an old one and then import. Granted I would still like to improve
>> this part of my process, as it is the only thing which is not
>> automatically being tracked. It's the last manual process, but
>> fortunately because it is dumping into the repository as well, I don't
>> have to rename the exported DB name and I can thus just re-use the same
>> script to dump. I guess theoretically you could batch that with drush
>> even, or before any drush update.
>
> For a new site, this is nice, but if you develop
> for a site with content, this get's complicated,
> since you don't want to overwrite the content. At
> least not, when you propagate your new settings
> and code to the the live version. Any solution for
> that?
>
>> If anyone has a better way of getting an snapshot of the DB I'd love to
>> hear it.
>
> Me too.
>
> Have a nice day
> Rolf
>