[Neeeeeeeeeel.-]

I need help to start using Github at work.

I'm an employee of a small software developing company. We didn't ever use any version control system so I told my boss that it was time to start using Github. He agreed so he bought me an organization membership at Github (because we need private repositories).

Our web-based software has more than 1000 files (it's only hosted in our cloud). The whole team is always making changes on them.

Up to now, we have two servers. The test server and the production server. We use FTP to upload our changes.

We can't use git repositories locally, I mean we can't clone the repository in every developer PC because we would need to syncronize the server database somewhere at our office and it is not an option.

What I tought was to create a web-based enviroment for each developer in our test server. So each developer can have its own fork hosted at our test server. (Something like: https://example.com/git/DEVUSERNAME/proyect1). They will be able to make changes throught FTP (like they do now). Here is where my troubles started, to achive my goal I will have to make a web-based interface to use "git" on our test server, so each developer will be able to commit, push, etc on its own fork. How can I do it? Any ideas?

I tried sending git commands throught "shell_exec" function but I got into many troubles. Maybe someone can think in something better & simple.

[asherkin]

Don't.

Do the work to setup proper local testing environments, you don't need (and shouldn't be using) the full production DB for development.

[fysiks]

I agree with Asherkin. It is unwise to try what you are doing. It will be much less of a headache to have a small local testing environment (that does NOT contain the actual real life data, but rather fake data that serves the purposes of testing).

[Powerlord]

Originally Posted by asherkin Don't. Do the work to setup proper local testing environments, you don't need (and shouldn't be using) the full production DB for development.

Sadly, where I work it's not feasible to have separate DBs for each dev due to the data we're working with being hundreds of GB large (it deals with spatial data for an area approximately 96,716 sq miles / 250,493 km²).

Having said that, you should at least have multiple copies of said DB running. Where I work we have 3: One for Development, one for User Acceptance Testing, and one for Production.

[fysiks]

Originally Posted by Powerlord Having said that, you should at least have multiple copies of said DB running. Where I work we have 3: One for Development, one for User Acceptance Testing, and one for Production.

That is basically what he was suggesting. Having one for testing that is separate from the production database. If ALL of the data is actually required then it's obvious that it's not feasible to have each developer have their own DB but it is feasible to have one internal database for all developers to use for testing (there shouldn't be much if any changes required to switch between the development DB and the production DB if you have your stuff setup correctly.

[Neeeeeeeeeel.-]

Finally I decided to create one ssh user with restricted privileges for each developer so they can run git commands from the server through ssh. A local database is not an option, we can't do it. We have financial informacion about every customer company.