Entries with the tag “git”

As a contractor, I go into a lot of projects. Sometimes these are set up perfectly and other times they need a bit of work for me to be effective and efficient. Some clients are willing to accept updates for tooling, others don’t have the time, budget or ability to accept these updates. So, how can I use my tools - which require configuration files - without editing their project? Actually, git has a nice built-in functionality that will work perfect for this - and it’s not the .gitignore file.

You’re using Pull Requests in GitHub and everything is working great! Nice workflow! But now you have a problem: deploying from develop to main via a … what? A PR? A merge commit if you bring the two branches down to your local machine? What else? What about a GitHub action that you can use to do this? Here’s a simple proof of concept with explanation - you may still need to alter this for your workflow.

Sometimes you may want to make a completely empty git branch in your repo. This is how you can do it.

Since git does not store folders specifically (just path information), if you need an empty folder in your project that can be hard. Especially if that folder needs git to ignore any content inside of it. A community convention to solve this challenge has been the .gitkeep file. This is not part of the spec, combining that file with various .gitignore rules can solve this problem. But, there’s a better way.

I had a need to mirror a git repository on Github, but I wasn’t allowed to fork the repository. Luckily, there is a mirror option built into git.

I’m a sucker for those little badges at the top of the README files in Github repos. I know you can get them from external services, but could I host my own? Let’s find out.

Github is one of the most useful tools I have in my arsenal. With over 100 repositories (some of which are private), it’s the best $7/mo I spend. However, there are a couple things about Github you might not know.

I manage any WordPress plugins I create using git. In order to create a distribution of those, I need to zip up the source code and use that to upload to the marketplace (or directly upload). This was easy with SVN - I just used an svn export command and there we go.

At my current job, we keep both a private copy of the code in BitBucket (where all of our code resides), and make a few repos public on GitHub. (Wish I didn’t have to do that, but really, GitHub is the premier place to get your code it seems these days.) So, I decided to come up with a solution to keep both repos up to date as I do my development.

Do you use Git to manage your repository? If so, do you use it to check out code onto the server as well? If you do, you really should restrict access to your .git directory if it’s in your public root. (If you’re using things like Zend Framework, chances are your root directory is not your public directory, so you have less to worry about.)