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Perch, Version Control & Deployment

I'm new to Perch (building my first site at the moment) and am fairly new to version control. I recently read Rachel's post on 24 ways https://24ways.org/2014/developing-robust-deployment-procedures/ which gave a great introduction to the whole process, however I do have a couple of questions related to what happens once the site is live…

  1. When / if carrying out further development, what's the best way to pull the live site back into the local development environment?

  2. Is it necessary / recommended to pull the latest site content back into the local environment when making changes that don't involve the content?

  3. What would be the difference in process between working with Perch and Runway? Is there a difference?

  4. How does the official Perch Backup app figure into this process?

Just to give you a bit more background, I'm more of a designer / front-end developer. I've used a few different CMS's including Concrete5, Wordpress and ModX but have never done any kind of version control with them because I never had a clue where to start before reading Rachel's article so am interested to see how this works with Perch which I guess would be the same with most systems…

Cheers, Al
Alan Charlesworth

Alan Charlesworth 0 points

  • 6 years ago
Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

6 years ago

When / if carrying out further development, what's the best way to pull the live site back into the local development environment?

You'd need to download the new pages and resources, plus the database.

Is it necessary / recommended to pull the latest site content back into the local environment when making changes that don't involve the content?

If the changes don't involve the content, then it's simply down to your preference.

What would be the difference in process between working with Perch and Runway? Is there a difference?

It's much, much simpler in Runway. You can use cloud buckets and the backup/restore functionality to sync the live and dev sites. Here's a video I made showing it:

https://grabaperch.com/blog/archive/migrating-sites-with-backup-and-restore

How does the official Perch Backup app figure into this process?

The regular Perch backup app will help you make a backup of the database and resources to download, but it's pretty simple. The Perch Runway backup/restore functionality is much more powerful.