[development] Workflow: staging server, source control, and the files directory

[Laura Scott]

On Feb 18, 2011, at 3:14 AM, Andy Fowlston wrote:

> * Exclude the files directory from source control altogether, and change the local update process to just copy from the staging server's files directory to the local. This would work, just feels slightly wrong to me as the db contains content that refers to the files, and that *is* in source control.

It could become ungainly if you had a lot of uploaded files, but you in theory *could* keep the raw image files in source control. However, by all means, you should exclude imagecache (aka "image" module in D7) renderings from source control as your local environment will generate those anyway, and we've found that those can cause all kinds of conflicts between what Drupal and Git think are fresh. Nothing like a stupid conflict between copies of a non-critical image file to gum up what should be a quick merge. (I know you mention subversion, but the theory's the same.)

In general, though, unless you're working on the theme, having broken images in your local instance is not deadly, in my experience.

Laura Scott
http://pingv.com