Putting WordPress, Git and Plesk at work together [closed]

Question

I am developing a WordPress 5.2.3 site. My provider offers Plesk Obsidian 18.0.21 as admin tool. I want to store the custom PHP source code and the image upload area on a private GitHub repository. Images are currently too few to justify an autonomous storage solution, like S3 or similar. I am not concerned about the DB used by WP, because its backups are already well managed.

I am new to WP development and I am unsure which directories must be preserved on the GitHub repository, so I decided to store on GitHub the whole httpdocs area of my server.

I have performed the following operations:

• installed WP from my Plesk console

• zipped the whole lot from the Plesk file manager

• downloaded the zipfile on my PC

• created an empty repo on GitHub

• cloned the GitHub repo on my PC

• expanded the zipfile in the local repo on my PC

• committed the new files and pushed to GitHub

• deleted the files on the server using the Plesk file manager

• from the Plesk console, enabled Git for my domain and linked it to the GitHub repo

• on GitHub I have installed the public key provided by Plesk, allowing both read and write access to the repo

The clone performed by Plesk went smoothly: all the files from the remote GitHub repo have been copied, I can see on the Plesk console that the git log reports every commit, and the WP site works perfectly.

Now I have uploaded a test image from the WP admin dashboard, the directory uploads shows the new image file in the Plesk file manager, and now I wish to push it to GitHub.

I enter the httpdocs directory with an SSH shell, but there is no trace of a .git directory. I try git status and the answer is not a git repository.

Has Plesk performed a real git clone, or has it just created a directory that allows GitHub hooks to fire and copy files there?

I may be possibly doing things the wrong way, but I have basically two needs:

• develop PHP code (widgets, custom post types, etc.)

• upload images from the WP admin dashboard

Both these assets must be versioned on GitHub.

I understand that I can develop the PHP code on my PC, push it on GitHub and have the hooks bring the changes on my Plesk-managed server. But I cannot envision a workflow for storing on GitHub the uploaded images, because they originate from the Plesk-managed server.

Is there a best practice for addressing both these needs at the same time in my environment?

Answer 1

I reckon I may have posted something too specific. I thought that talking about version control using Plesk in a webmasters' Q&A site would trigger more attention (that's why I didn't post on the StackExchange WordPress site), but most attention went indeed on WordPress. Ok, too bad.

Having to solve the problem by myself, I came to the conclusion that Git support in Plesk is too limited.

With Plesk I can have local copies of remote Git repositories, but they are just supposed to pull. Any changes created on the Plesk server cannot be pushed to the remote; this flies in the face of WordPress, which by default stores media assets locally.

Therefore, I removed all the Git stuff I had arranged in the Plesk console, got with SSH into my Plesk server, initialized a Git repository in httpdocs, pushed it to GitHub and was done with it.