Dev site vs. production site
These are some very, "You are clearly new at this," kinds of questions, but I have never had the opportunity to get hands-on experience in a proper dev/production environment. I've only had experience with my own projects, so I've just been doing things my own way.
At the moment, when I want to make a change to my website, I do what I need to locally, and then to "push to production" I just drag and drop the relevant folders onto the server and carefully avoid adding anything to the production site that's specific to my local dev version of it.
This is obviously not how you do that, but I don't know what the alternative is or how to set it up.
So how does having a dev site vs a production site actually work?
How do you sync changes made to the dev site to the production site? Are these two websites separate branches that you maintain with git? How do I use git with a shared hosting Apache server (or anything, really, but this is what I have for hosting) that I have zero physical access to? The option for git is there, but when I use it, it just makes a new directory for me with no (easily understood) explanation on what I'm meant to do with it, likely because I'm expected to already know (which I don't). How would I link that to my local dev environment? I have repos on github--is it possible to link all of these things together somehow...? Would I even want to do that? My gut says no, but I don't know.
This is probably my biggest knowledge gap when it comes to this stuff, and I would really like to start filling it in if anyone has time to break it down for me, or tell me where I can start learning.
Thank you.
At the moment, when I want to make a change to my website, I do what I need to locally, and then to "push to production" I just drag and drop the relevant folders onto the server and carefully avoid adding anything to the production site that's specific to my local dev version of it.
This is obviously not how you do that, but I don't know what the alternative is or how to set it up.
So how does having a dev site vs a production site actually work?
How do you sync changes made to the dev site to the production site? Are these two websites separate branches that you maintain with git? How do I use git with a shared hosting Apache server (or anything, really, but this is what I have for hosting) that I have zero physical access to? The option for git is there, but when I use it, it just makes a new directory for me with no (easily understood) explanation on what I'm meant to do with it, likely because I'm expected to already know (which I don't). How would I link that to my local dev environment? I have repos on github--is it possible to link all of these things together somehow...? Would I even want to do that? My gut says no, but I don't know.
This is probably my biggest knowledge gap when it comes to this stuff, and I would really like to start filling it in if anyone has time to break it down for me, or tell me where I can start learning.
Thank you.
