Less oh-shit with git

Less ‘Oh Sh*t’ With GIT
How having a GIT-based workﬂow can make your life inﬁnitely easier

Wednesday, 16 May 12

What with a who-now?
• Who the hell are you?
• What the hell are you
talking about?

• What the hell is a
‘Workﬂow’ ?

• What the hell is
‘GIT’?

• Oh. Why the hell am I
not using this thing?

2


Who the hell are you?
• Richard Tape
• Sticky, sello, masking,
video, worm. You’re
welcome

• Working with WP
professionally for >3
years. Thanks Mike!

• @RichardTape
• http://rich.is/ (coming
soon) but have site at
http://iamfriendly.com/

3


!important
• Here’s what I’m not
saying:
★ That my WorkFlow is the One
True Way ©

★ That what I do is ‘right’

★ That you should copy what I do
without having a basic
understanding of what you’re
doing

★ Manchester City deserved to
win the Premiership Title this
year

4


What the hell are you talking
about, then?

• What is a Workﬂow and why do I need one?
• Richard, what were you doing this time last year?
• Haha. That’s ridiculous. You’re an idiot. What are you doing now,
though?

• But I already have my way of doing things and it works great.
When do you stop talking? You’re boring.

• OK, OK, as it’d apparently be ‘rude’ if I got up and left, you might
as well tell me about this ‘GIT’ thing. ENTERTAIN ME.

5


What is a Workflow?
You’re going to crack out a dictionary definition aren’t you?
You’re so predictable.

1. The scheduling of independent jobs on a computer.

2. The set of relationships between all the activities in a
project, from start to finish. Activities are related by different
types of trigger relation. Activities may be triggered by
external events or by other activities.

3. The movement of documents around an organisation for
purposes including sign-off, evaluation, performing activities
in a process and co-writing.

6


And in English, please?

How you go about your day-to-day
tasks and the systems you put in
place to allow you to do those tasks
more easily

7


Richard, what were you doing
this time last year?

• Work locally using a MAMP setup.
• WordPress Multisite installation, each ‘project’ was a new
site.
• When happy with work, sFTP to live site. Cross fingers and
sacrifice a goat in the hope that it wouldn’t break.

• For edits: either edit file locally and re-upload or, if I was in
a rush, edit the file on the live server. Yes, I’m going straight
to hell.

• For database: local and live sites were entirely separate.

8


Live ﬁle
editing?
Hahaha. HAHAHAHA.
AAAAHAHAHAHAHA.

You’re an idiot.

(Secretly, I sometimes do this too. But don’t tell
anyone)


What are you doing now?
• All source ﬁles (including WP core) are version controlled
in GIT - stored in local repos and on github

• I make all edits locally (even though I am sysadmin on my
live server, I have intentionally revoked my rights to edit
ﬁles directly)

• Commit to local git repo. Push to github.
• Post Commit hooks on github automatically pulls all edits
onto staging server

• If happy on staging, deploy changes to live

11


GIT? Repo? Staging? Deploy?
• GIT is a VCS - a version control system (a ‘distributed’ one
at that) and source code management (SCM)
★ It keeps track of all changes you make to your files
★ You can think of it like the Revisions System in WordPress

• Repo is short for Repository.
★ It’s sort of like a database
★ When you make changes to your files, you ‘commit’ them to your local repo
★ If you have made a mistake, you can simply ‘roll back’ to a previous state
★ Sort of like an ‘undo’ feature for all of your files

12


GIT? Repo? Staging? Deploy?
• Staging
★ An intermediary between your local environment and the live site
★ Ideally, the staging server and the live server have identical setups
★ Means you can see exactly what your changes will look like on the live site without the
panic of ‘guessing’

• Deploy
★ The equivalent of FTP’ing all your changes elsewhere

★ When you ‘deploy’ something you’re effectively “making it live”

13


Hang on. So you don’t FTP?
Anything?

• Nope. Not a sausage.

• If I need to install a plugin I do it locally. Then commit and
push to github.

• This then automatically grabs all ﬁles to the staging server
(which means FTP is disabled on my server so (a little)
more secure.

• Likewise with themes.

14


Iiiinteresting. Veeeery
interesting.
15


OK smart-arse, what about
content?

• Content is a little more complicated

• Text is stored in a database, so no ‘ﬂat ﬁles’ as such (there
is, kinda, but it’s complicated and not for now)

• Can do a ‘database dump’ change references to ‘local’
environment and replace with links to live site

• Or...

• RAMP Plugin by Crowd Favorite
http://crowdfavorite.com/wordpress/ramp/

16


Holy Frack. How Much?!
• Yeah, it’s not cheap. But it does a great job.

• Also, it has a developer API, so all of the themes and plugins
that I develop are ‘RAMP-enabled’ which mean that any
user of said themes or plugins can beneﬁt from RAMP’s
content management

• Free Alternative: DeployMint by Mark Maunder
http://code.google.com/p/deploymint/

18


Care to
show me an
example?
This can only go well


OH GOD!
THE
CONSOLE
• You don’t have to use
the console, there are
several apps you can
use

• Tower or github for
mac

• GIT Gui / TortoiseGIT
for Windows


But I work
in a team?
• On some projects, so
do I!

• Different people have
their own ‘local’
repository and work
on different branches

• These are then
‘merged’ as and when

21


What about backups?
• Well, because your code is all stored on GitHub, you already
have 1 level of backup. RAMP handles media, too.

• For the database, I use a plugin called BackupPress (http://
www.getbackuppress.com) - it ‘just works’ and allows you to
restore your database back to a previous state if things go
awry

• Alternative: WP-DBManager (https://wordpress.org/
extend/plugins/wp-dbmanager/)

• I also have a cron job on my server which does a dump twice
a day.

22


I’ve forgotten absolutely
everything you’ve just said

• Having a workflow you are both comfortable with and that
you stick to is more important than what the workflow
actually is

• Use a Version Control System; they will - after a small
learning curve - become a God-send

• Never, ever edit files on a live server. Ever. Forever, ever.
• Have a fallback plan
• Don’t just jump straight into something - do some reading
about it first, understand it, then take small steps

23


Credits
• http://bit.ly/JDjfYd

• http://bit.ly/L3Z3vL

• http://bit.ly/K3NJAZ

• http://bit.ly/L44VF3

• http://bit.ly/JtUO25

• http://bit.ly/JSTJz1

• http://bit.ly/IXPLRE

• http://bit.ly/Kt1NaX

• http://bit.ly/J85QZK

• http://bit.ly/L6md4t

• http://bit.ly/LScNN4

• http://bit.ly/JJdes2


Less oh-shit with git

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