Git - how to handle symlinks

Question

What is the correct way to handle symlinks in git?

I have the following structure:

Vendors   Module A   Module B   Module C App  Code    Modules      Core Module 1      Core Module 2      Module A (symlinked to vendors)      Module B (symlinked to vendors)      Module C (symlinked to vendors) 

There is a a main App directory which contains all of the core code in the application. Additionally there is a vendor directory that contains modules which get symlinked into the main app directory and therefore integrated.

Importantly, both the vendor directory and the main app directory are both versioned in the same repository.

Therefore, should i let git keep storing the symlinks, or find a way to have it ignore symlinks?

Answer 1

Git can handle symlinks just fine as long as the operating system used by all developers supports them. Since you depend on having these symlinks present I will assume that your development environments all support symlinks.

To decide if something should be included in your git repository or not (symlink or otherwise) consider the following:

• Is it a file generated by some tool or other process in the repository? If so, it's best to ignore it and let each user generate the file, so that they will always have the latest version.
• Is the file specific to a particular user's development environment, or one that is used in all environments? If it's a quirk of a particular user's environment, like a configuration to ignore Emacs backup files, it doesn't belong in the repo. If it's something all developers will need, and/or something that's needed to build the application for production, it should go in the repository.

In your case it seems like the symlinks are not generated and they are needed in all environments, so putting them in the repository should be fine.

However, when creating them be sure to create them as relative symlinks rather than absolute symlinks, so that they'll work regardless of where the repository is cloned. The easiest way to do this is to change directory into the Modules directory and create the symlink from there:

cd App/Code/Modules ln -s "../../../Vendors/Module A" "Module A" 

Answer 2

Git stores the symlink, just like any other file in its version control - except for a symlink it would only store the information about the path it is symlinking to, and the file type as symlink instead of a regular file.

If the symlink points to a directory, git does not store the contents under the symlinked directory.

So there should be no harm in storing symlinks versioned under git for your case.

One more thing you need to be aware of with symlinks is that, git would only recreate the symlinks on a fresh clone, not the file or directory it is pointing at. There are chances that the symlinked path would be non-existent (say when using absolute paths).