We followed the Ignition and VCS "best practices" guide for getting internal projects managed in a specific Gateway working with GitHub. The guide was great and I really appreciate it.
Now, we are working on some Ignition projects external to our organization. I'd like to have a local working copy of the Gateway and projects (by downloading a Gateway backup) and running that Gateway instance locally (at least in the beginning). I'd rather not start fumbling around on a deployed application and mess something up for the customer. The customer does not have VCS setup.
When I do a Gateway restore, I assume it will put whatever projects were contained in the .gwbk file (Ignition 8.1) in the default directory for Windows on my local machine: C:Program Files/Inductive Automation/..../Projects? And this will disturb the local repo I have there.
I could just restore the customer's Gateway backup locally, setup VCS for it, push that to a repo, and then when I'm done working on the client's Gateway, restore the latest .gwbk from one of our internal projects and re-clone the repo. But that seems like I'm just brute forcing my way through my ignorance.
I'm also assuming that the solution to my current pickle, e.g. having multiple local Gateway instances running, each with their own VCS, is to use Docker images or VM's?
Any advice would be appreciated on best practices or workflows for popping between different local Gateway instances. Thank you!