Best practices for using Git with Magento?

Question

I\'m working at figuring out how to best work within my own repo for custom code while integrating with a vendor\'s library (in this case Magento). In my case, I will not n

Answer 1

Quilt-like workflow

This is exactly what was previously done with quilt, that you nowadays do with Stacked Git (on top of Git), Mercurial Queues (on top of Hg) or Loom (on top of Bazaar).

The idea is to maintain a series of patches stacked on one another, that applies to the files versioned by the SCM (potentially also creating new files, which would be the case for you). At any time, you can pop the stack entirely, update the upstream code, then restack all your patches one by one. If they all apply cleanly, it is done automatically, if not, the process stops at the first faulty patch.

Pure Git

The following considers you are cloning a Magento Git repo. If they don't use Git, you can still do it by first translating their history to Git, for example with tailor.

Rebase

Git makes it easy to re-apply a part of the history from a different starting point, by rebasing. So you could also just clone Magento, work your code and, when updating Magento, doing it from the last clean Magento revision and then rebasing your work on the new clean Magento revision.

You basically follow Quilt's workflow with normal Git tools.

Branches

Yet another way of doing it would be to simply use branches. You clone Magento's repo, branch from it, do your thing, and when you fetch Magento's latest revisions, you merge the two branches. It's just typical DVCS workflow, considering you as a Magento developper working on a feature branch that will never make it to the main branch…