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ohmatt
ohmatt

Reputation: 93

GitHub Multiple Repositories vs. Branching for multiple environments

This might be a very beginner question, but I'm working on a large production website in a startup environment. I just recently started using Heroku, Github, and Ruby on Rails because I'm looking for much more flexibility and version control as compared to just locally making changes and uploading to a server.

My question, which might be very obvious, is if I should use a different repository for each environment (development, testing, staging, production, etc.) or just a main repository and branches to handle new features.

My initial thought is to create multiple repositories. For instance, if I add a new feature, like an image uploader, I would use the code from the development repository. Make the changes, and upload it with commits along the way to keep track of the small changes. Once I had tested it locally I would want to upload it to the test repository with a single commit that lists the feature added (e.g. "Added Image Uploader to account page").

My thought is this would allow micro-managing of commits within the development environment, while the testing environment commits would be more focused on bug fixes, etc.

This makes sense in my mind because as you move up in environments you remove the extraneous commits and focus on what is needed for each environment. I could also see how this could be achieved with branches though, so I was looking for some advice on how this is handled. Pros and cons, personal examples, etc.

I have seen a couple other related questions, but none of them seemed to touch on the same concerns I had.

Thanks in advance!

-Matt

Upvotes: 6

Views: 3778

Answers (1)

VonC
VonC

Reputation: 1324278

Using different repos makes sense with a Distributed VCS, and I mention that publication aspect (push/pull) in:

The one difficult aspect of managing different environments is the configuration files which can contain different values per environment.

For that, I recommend content fiter driver:

content filter

That helps generating the actual config files with the current values in them, depending on the current deployment environment.

Upvotes: 2

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