General developer forum

That's pretty much what I do here too

Iñaki.

For multiple simultaneous checkouts, I also use a reference repository (ie, using references that Penny elucidated).

I'm often looking at custom code in many of our branches, and at the moment I have about twenty clones that point to my reference repository.

The size of my shared-git-moodle-r2 directory is 322MB, while a clone of MOODLE_19_STABLE is 111MB.

It's a pain to manually create a new config.php file, moodle-data directory, and postgres database for each checkout, so I wrote a shell script:

-------
#!/bin/sh
# clone BRANCH [INSTANCE]

branch="$1"
instance="$2";

if [ "z$branch" = "z" ] ; then
 echo "Usage: $0 BRANCH [INSTANCE]"
 exit 1
fi

if [ "z$instance" = "z" ] ; then
 instance="$branch"
fi

cd /var/www
echo 'cloning repo'
git clone --reference /var/www/shared-git-moodle-r2/.git git+ssh://git.catalyst.net.nz/var/git/moodle-r2.git $instance
cd $instance
git branch --track $branch origin/$branch
echo 'checking out repo'
git checkout $branch
cp ../config.php .
echo 'creating config.php file'
replace moodle $instance < ../config.php > config.php

echo 'creating db'
createdb $instance

echo 'creating moodledata directory'
sudo mkdir /var/data/$instance
sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/data/$instance
sudo chmod 777 /var/data/$instance

echo 'launching in firefox'
firefox http://localhost/$instance &
------

Note on the usage:

I use 'branch' to reference the branch I'm cloning, and 'instance' for the name of the checkout I want. Say I want to checkout the branch 'MOODLE_19_STABLE' and call it 'moodle_19_stable' or 'mdl19-test':
sudo clone MOODLE_19_STABLE moodle_19_stable
sudo clone MOODLE_19_STABLE mdl19-test

I use a config.php file in /var/www/ for the replace command:

<?php /// Moodle Configuration File

unset($CFG);
$CFG = new stdClass();

$CFG->dbtype = 'postgres7';
$CFG->dblibrary = 'adodb';
$CFG->dbhost = 'user=\'general\' password=\'\' dbname=\'moodle\'';
$CFG->dbname = '';
$CFG->dbuser = '';
$CFG->dbpass = '';
$CFG->prefix = 'mdl_';

$CFG->wwwroot = 'http://localhost/moodle';
$CFG->dirroot = '/var/www/moodle';
$CFG->dataroot = '/var/data/moodle/';
$CFG->admin = 'admin';

$CFG->directorypermissions = 00777; // try 02777 on a server in Safe Mode

require_once("$CFG->dirroot/lib/setup.php");
// MAKE SURE WHEN YOU EDIT THIS FILE THAT THERE ARE NO SPACES, BLANK LINES,
// RETURNS, OR ANYTHING ELSE AFTER THE TWO CHARACTERS ON THE NEXT LINE.
?>

A big thanks to MartinL for presenting the reference repository method to the newer Moodle developers at Catalyst a couple years ago.

Hmm that seems quite a neat solution.

Will it be possible to share commits between checkouts when you use --reference? Err to explain:

• Create a moodle19 and moodle20 checkout based on a single object directory
• Commit to moodle19 (and don't push/cvs commit it)
• git cherry-pick the commit in to the moodle20 checkout