Git with Drupal 7 multi-site, naming directories

Question

I have been working in a single installation of Drupal 7, which has two sites built upon it.

In Drupal 7 multiple sites are served by naming a directory for each site to be served under /sites and include settings, themes and modules specific to that site.

sites
|
|__ 8888.website-one.dev
|   |__ settings.php
|   |__ files
|   |__ themes
|
|__ 8888.website-two.dev
    |__ settings.php
    |__ files
    |__ themes

So the system identifies the site based upon the domain (in my case the preceding 8888 is the port number I use to work internally).

When I push this installation to a remote dev server using Git, the domains I use to access the installation will need to change, and so the directory names would have to change too; which means that I wouldn't be able to have the installation working on both my local and remote development boxes.

Is it possible, with Git, to change a directory name on the remote server, and keep it the same on my local server, while still tracking the files inside those folders?

Many thanks!

Answer 1

You don't need to consider a whacky git-based solution to this, Drupal has you covered.

Just uses aliases in sites.php, and use whatever method you like (assume-unchanged in the index, .gitignore, whatever) to keep sites.php out of the repo.

So on your local machine your sites.php might contain

$sites['website-one.dev'] = 'website-one';
$sites['website-two.dev'] = 'website-two';

And on a remote server:

$sites['website-one.staging'] = 'website-one';
$sites['website-two.staging'] = 'website-two';

And prod:

$sites['website-one.com'] = 'website-one';
$sites['website-two.com'] = 'website-two';

All the while, your sites live in 'website-one' and 'website-two' respectively; no need for tricks.

If you don't want to consider a Drupal-based solution, and still want to use git, I'd advise taking this over to Stack Overflow where such a question would be on-topic.