Git Deploy

Git Deploy lets you develop on a live site and still satisfy version requirements and get accurate results from the update status system. This makes it easier to contribute to the projects you use.

Version information is added automatically when the Drupal packaging system creates a release. If you check out a contributed project from the Drupal repository with Git, it should not have any version information. Git Deploy gets the missing version information from the project's Git log.

See Tricks for using Composer when developing a contrib module locally for how to install from a Git repository with Composer.

Requirements

Version 2 of Git Deploy requires access to the git command and the ability for PHP to execute shell commands. Version 1 runs entirely in PHP, but requires the glip library.

Similar projects and how they are different

Drush 8

A project’s dev release changes whenever a maintainer updates its branch. To enforce consistency among sites using a dev release, you can lock them to the same release by checking out a specific Git commit. You would not contribute changes from these sites back to the project. Drush 8 can automatically add version information to projects you check out with Git.

• The drush pm-download command with options --package-handler=git_drupalorg --gitinfofile performs a Git clone and checkout and adds version information to the project info file.
• The drush make command automatically adds version information to the project info file without additional options.

Composer Deploy

Composer Deploy gets version information from Composer metadata for projects installed with Composer.

Known issue

Git Deploy is unable to provide version info to the Drush 8 update-db command. Since this is the only version of Drush that supports Drupal 7, updates of Drupal 7 modules that have specific version dependencies will fail if any of those dependencies are installed with Git. Moshe Weitzman has refused to accept a fix. You can use a fork of Drush 8 to run updates on Drupal 7.