Git for Administrators

An alternative way to maintaining your Moodle server via CVS is using Git. This page describes how to maintain a copy of Moodle on your production server, that is easy to upgrade using Git. If you have customisations of Moodle core code, you are advised to follow the instructions in this start guide.

Getting the code from Git

You can find the official Moodle git repository at git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git and git://github.com/moodle/moodle.git. To initialize your local checkout, use

   git clone git://github.com/moodle/moodle.git                    (1)
   cd moodle
   git branch -a                                                   (2)
   git checkout -b MOODLE_19_STABLE origin/MOODLE_19_STABLE        (3)

The command (1) initializes new local repository as a clone of upstream moodle.git repository. The command (2) lists all available branches. Use the command (3) to switch to a different branch than the default 'master'.

Updating your installation

Moodle development team performs integration and testing of fixed bugs every Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday you can install all patches by updating your code. Check the shortlog to see if the official repository has been already updated or not.

   cd /path/to/your/moodle/checkout
   git pull

Important note

At the moment, master branch represents Moodle 2.0.x stable code. It is wise to do a git branch -a before a git pull to see whether Moodle 2.0 isn't branched. If Moodle 2.0 gets branched and you are still on master, you will be updating to the latest development version, which is not desirable on a production server. This is an exception caused by the transition from CVS to Git and should not never happen again.