Using git with a PHPFog Wordpress app

Question

I have cloned a copy of my PHPFog Wordpress app to my local machine. I then have a few themes im working on with there own sperate repository. So I copy and paste a theme into my Wordpress repository and then sync it back up with PHPFog.

This works all well and good.

However If I update my Wordpress app in the admin panel, and later on sync up some changes I have made I lose the update, and go back to the version of Wordpress I started with.

How are you supposed to correctly work with git and PHPFOG if every change you make on your Wordpress admin panel gets overwritten with every sync from your local machine.

Am I supposed to update Wordpress and then do another clone in order to have the correct version on my local machine before making new changes, and if that is the case how do clone the updated Wordpress app to my local machine.

Thanks

Answer 1

Your right, file system changes, that are made from the Wordpress admin, do not get added to your PHP Fog repo, and can get blown away on the next push.

A better way to handle this issue is to run your Wordpress installation locally on your development system like you hintted to. I use mamp for mac or wamp or xampp for windows to make changes in the Wordpress admin locally then check in and push those changes. This will let you see the results of your changes without effecting your production site. I think the time invested setting this up is well worth it.

To get this running you should install either mamp or wamp and install a fresh copy of wordpress in order to make sure mysql is running locally and the wordpress installation is able to connect. Then in a new folder clone a fresh copy of your repo and load that up in the browser. The url will be something like localhost:8888. It should fail to find the database but that is expected. You will need to configure your local environment variables (listed below) to point to the locally running mysql server. Look in the wp-config.php file of the fresh install for the database settings. Do not use the wp-config.php settings of your cloned repo. You do not want to make changes to wp-config.php file because those changes will get checked into the repo and it will break your production site after the push.

MYSQL_DB_HOST 
MYSQL_DB_NAME
MYSQL_USERNAME
MYSQL_PASSWORD

Here is a great link that explains this process in more detail: http://docs.phpfog.com/getting-started/development