Convert a site installed via FTP to now use Git

• With FTP, you upload / edit replace software files manually. If you edit a file, and later upgrade your site, you will lose your customization.
• With Git, each software file is tracked, including any edits to the files. And thus, your changes are merged into the update.

Example

In this example we will turn an FTP tiki 20.x instance (which is tagged as such in Git) managed by Git.

We assume you are familiar with Get code.

• website: http://tikiconvert.docker/
• document root: /var/www/virtual/tikiconvert.docker/html

First backup your things

1. Create a folder to place your backups

cd /var/www/virtual/tikiconvert.docker/
mkdir backup

2. Backup your database

eval $(sed -n '/^\$/s/^\$//p' html/db/local.php)
mysqldump -u$user_tiki           \
          -p$pass_tiki           \
          -h$host_tiki $dbs_tiki \
    | gzip > backup/$dbversion_tiki.sql.gz

3. Backup your current folder

tar -czvf backup/html.tar.gz html

Checkout the same version as your current Tiki install

git clone git@gitlab.com:tikiwiki/tiki.git -b 20.x newinstall

To reduce disk space, you can add the following parameter to the command above (before newinstall):
--depth 1 --no-single-branch

If you have a specific version like for example 20.0

git checkout tags/20.0

If you're experiencing issues in git clone, you can use https://gitlab.com/tikiwiki/tiki.git instead of git@gitlab.com:tikiwiki/tiki.git.

List of all branches
List of all tags

Copy your old site over the fresh Git checkout

Now copy your old site over the new install, if there are any modified or new files, they will override the ones of your checkout (the working copy but not the reference files in .git/ folders).

cp -a html/. newinstall/

Check for differences

git status newinstall
git diff newinstall

If Git shows modified files, you should solve that before continuing.
If you are experiencing problems with files permissions you can disable git from checking permissions.

git config core.fileMode false

Launch new instance

cd /var/www/virtual/tikiconvert.docker
mv html old && mv newinstall html

Test and remove old folder

Browse your website and check features you use are ok, after that remove old folder, but stick with your backup!

rm -Rf old