I was super optimistic and was going to fix our development problems by putting our production project folder on git and then clone it to make new projects that my people could use(and later merge). And finally be rid of the endless problems with saving over each other in the designer. (sigh)
But now after some trial and error I found that cloning a project folder does not in fact make a functioning new project. Or maybe i’m just doing something slightly wrong?
Does anyone have a way to make this work or are the projects to tightly coupled with the rest of ignition to be copied like this?
I have read some posts where people say they are running a whole new ignition server to achieve a similar result. But that seams a little extreme for just working on Perspective and UI related stuff.
I’m on version 8.1.43 and doing my testing on a trial, the production server has a license.
That brings up another question if I have to go the way of putting the whole server in a repo and cloning it will I hit licensing issues ?
yes I made my ignition/data/projects/mainproject into a repo and cloned it to ignition/data/projects/myclonedproject.
After that I thought I would just open my designer launcher and see the “myclonedproject” there and open it.
I restarted the gateway just in case it needed to do some back end loading to show the project in the designer launcher but nothing showed up. This seamed like such a clean way of handling version control. I thought for sure it would work.
ahh I might have misunderstood how the repository cloning works. it added an additional folder layer so it makes complete sense that my way didn’t work This requires some more testing on my part.
This should work in 8.3, not sure about 8.1.. There may be something in the internal dB, I'm not sure. In 8.3 you would need to also tell the system to scan for changes, or wait max 5mins for it to auto scan (I think it still does that…)
Update on this, I ended up copying the project and making each project its own repository. Then when one developer has a new feature we just merge his repo to a project repo we call staging. And from there to the production project. This allows us to review changes and keep everything mostly clean.
There are some quirks like you have to do –allow-unrelated-histories on first merge of every project.
This way we can at least work on stuff without saving over each other constantly and keep track of our changes. I have no idea if rolling back changes will actually work(forgot to test it before we started). In theory it should be fine
There are some annoying things like .resource files changeing for no reason. But other then that it works just fine.
are you getting confused between repo and branch? It is usually a new feature branch that is merged to main branch.
Also, you can have all the projects in just one repo and just branch it to create new feature branch. When the changes are done in feature branch, then you can create a pull request to merge changes to the main branch.
