Version Control Strategies

Statamic is literally designed from the ground up to be 100% version controllable. The Flat File approach enables workflows that would be impossible with a database-driven platform. You can branch, fork, pull request, merge, and rollback any changes to your content, templates, assets, you name it.

If you’re used to using a Git workflow for your projects, you probably already have a good idea how to deploy your site updates. If not, check out Deploying Sites with Laravel Forge.

Dealing with changes on production

The area most people need a few creative ideas around is how to keep changes in production in sync with the repo. Here are a few solutions we’ve used in the past, present, and future.

The old “SSH and commit” trick

If you have full access to your server and you’re deploying with Git, it’s pretty trivial to SSH into production and run a few quick commands. You could even script/schedule this.

git add --all
git commit -m "changes from production"
git push

Spock

We built an addon that watches for changes to your content and then run whatever console commands you tell it. In this workflow, each change becomes a commit. You can even customize the commit messages with the name of the author, the url of the file changed, and so on. You get the picture.

Check out Spock and its docs.

Github as a control panel

As much as we love the control panel (we put a ton of work into it), there’s a really good argument for using Github as your control panel. Asana uses Statamic in this fashion and they have an awesome blog post about their workflow.

See how creative you can be when you remove the DB?

Don’t makes changes in production

Sure it seems obvious, but we don’t mind being thorough. You don’t always have to force your clients or content managers make changes in production. You could stand up a staging server (our license agreement allows for this, no second license needed!) so you could preview changes before they go live with the help of a developer, or someone who knows the basics of Git.

Don’t version control your content

We don’t like this one so much, but at least a handful of our users don’t actually version control their content. They mount it on Dropbox or AWS, or rsync the “one source of truth” to production. It’s another way to live.

But honestly, try to find a workflow that lets you just version control everything. Someday you will thank us. And when you do, send us a postcard.