Using git below web root in production

Question

I'm an avid git user; I use git in development; in staging, but not in production.

Are there any good reasons not to use git below the web root (/var/www/) in a production environment? I've been considering either using the master branch as the production branch, or creating a production branch.

push production master sounds so nice...

Answer 1

so nice... and yet so wrong somehow.

In production environment, you need to be concerned with:

• access security (how do you copy/deploy a delivery)
• stopping the right process of your app
• deploying a new version
• starting the right processes (in the right order)
• monitoring
• reporting

Version Control is not part of that picture: any extra tool you might want to install in a production environment is an extra potential failure point (and need administration and monitoring of its own).
Unless it has a direct link with the application you are deploying ("direct link" as in "your app won't work without that extra tool"), it shouldn't be on a production platform.

Make a git archive from your master branch as a nice tar archive, with a "version.txt" in it to identify the repo/SHA1 from which that archive has been done, and sftp/srsynch it to the production platform.
From there, no more Git needed.

Answer 2

Apart from the obvious aesthetic reason, permissions can often be a problem when you have a repository in /var/www.

On my production server, I have a bare repository in a private directory on branch production and a detached worktree in /var/www (see the core.worktree setting). Additionally, I have a post-receive hook to run git checkout -f, so all I have to do from my local computer is push to the production branch, and the rest is automatically taken care of.