Deploy to production with git, while installing a theme with composer

I’ve read the page in the docs about git deploy, which suggests to only commit the source user folder of my local dev environment. So far so good.

What I’ve done though, is encapsulate my theme in another git repo, and install it to my user/themes folder dynamically using composer (either from a local repo clone in root /packages or just pull it from github). This is a paradigm I know from some TYPO3 installs I’ve worked on, and it works great for code separation and usability, and ensures I automatically get the right theme on composer install.

This means I would have to commit my composer.json and composer.lock in the root of the grav installation as well, instead of just the user folder.

How do I best approach that? Also, I noticed that the grav updater overwrites the composer files, so my custom setup there got lost on upgrade.

Any suggestions?

PS: Oh, and I also want to use phpdotenv down the line, which is another thing that I need composer.json modified for.

You can use a .dependencies file in the user directory of your grav installation to create a manifest of plugins and themes, and run bin/grav install to install them. I recently wrote this into a README for a theme I'm redeveloping. Have a look there to save me re-explaining. I did notice an error in the first paragraph where I say the file should go into Grav's root. It should be in Grav user.

So:

Grav's command line interface install command will consult a YAML manifest of themes and plugins to install. You'll find Grav's default dependencies in a file called .dependencies in Grav's user directory.

(I don't think this file is officially documented BTW)

I generally have a few variations between environments (dev, test, prod), so I put the files under user/env/dev/.gitignore etc. I symlink user/.dependencies in each environment to the right one. (I also symlink user/env/<hostname> to user/env/dev, user/env/test etc. to keep my symlinks consistent.) I commit those environment dependencies. I don't commit the symlink at user/.dependencies because it changes per environment. So it's added into my .gitignore.

I have recently thought of a better way for me that won't involve setting symlinks in each environment. I haven't implemented this yet. Because I use Docker, I will simply bind mount user/env/<environment>/.dependencies to user/.dependencies. I use a slightly different standard docker-compose file for each environment anyway. (I actually chain them so that each environment has its own overrides, but that's a detail.) This might seem complicated but it keeps me away from the likes of Kubernetes :) This would only be a viable system if you are using Docker to deploy.

So my deploy becomes just a few steps now:

• git clone <user dir repo>
• docker-compose up -d
• bin/grav install

There are a few config edits and might be a few other steps like running composer for a some plugins that don't come bundled with their PHP dependencies. But it can be as quick as a few minutes, which is fine for how often I do it. Another thing I might do manually is upload files containing secrets that are excluded from my site repos.

A lot more detail than you asked for but it shows that you can come up with a pretty smooth workflow to suit you.