I've configured Composer to download HTMLPurifier locally, but Git won't push all the files to my OpenShift master repo. Why not?

Question

I've got Composer installed and I've used it to download HTMLPurifier locally. Now I'd like to push that download to my OpenShift Git repo. So, in a Git Bash window, I run the following...

git add -A :/

git commit -a -m "Uploading HTML Purifier"

git push origin master

At this point Git reports that the push was successful but when I ls the directory through SSH, it shows that the HTMLPurifier directory is empty. Why is that? How do I get Git to push those files?

Additional Info: I noticed that the HTMLPurifier directory is indeed a Git repo itself and contains a .gitignore file in its root directory. I tried deleting it and re-running the above commands but to no avail...

Answer 1

You should try to avoid pushing downloaded dependencies into a repository. It is recommended to add the vendor directory into the .gitignore file at top level. But what you must do instead is commit and push both composer.json and composer.lock.

Here's why: The vendor directory is managed by Composer. Running Composer will probably do minor things during an update, but may also be doing heavy stuff if the Composer team decides to optimize things.

Also, if you require a branch of a package, and Composer knows the repository of that package, it will default to cloning a Git repo or do a SVN checkout instead of trying to grab a ZIP package of that branch (often there is no way to get such a package for branches, and even tagged versions in a plain Git repository do not have such download ability. Composer knows that Github offers such downloads, and detects Github by looking at the repo URL.)

So you can assume that Composer will put a lot of repository meta data into the vendor file, and if you blindly commit these, things will get ugly. First of all, you are committing way too many files, increasing your repository by an unnecessary amount, which will slow down things. Then, if cloning Git repositories, these will be treated as submodules, and that has another bunch of nastiness I am told. If you are just learning Git, it probably isn't a good idea to start with these. And if you are sufficiently known to the tools (Git and Composer), you probably won't need them either.

There really is only one reason why you'd try to commit a modified version of the vendor directory: If your release process is completely depending on all files being present in your one repository, without any way to run a composer install during the release to make these files appear on the target server.

In such cases, you'd install or update the packages with Composer, and then go through all created directories and delete any .git and .svn (and probably also .hg for Mercurial) folders you encounter. Only then you'd be able to commit the files into your own repository.

But note that this step might be a tedious step to do manually - you probably want to create an update script that does all that work for you. You also might run into issues when updating dependencies because Composer expects files to simply go away when deleted, and not be in the way when being written. I cannot tell you exactly what you'd be experiencing because it depends on how you'd do stuff, but I expect you stumbling upon random puzzling issues.

Bottom line: Avoid committing the dependencies into your own repository if possible.

Answer 2

Try using the -force option, you will also most likely need to delete the .git directory inside the HTMLPurifier directory too.