So usually whenever I'm doing anything in Git, the steps are pretty straightforward: clone the repo I want to work on to my local machine, write some code, test it, commit it, and push (and of course branching, merging etc. are part of this also - your basic Git stuff). This works great for C#, C++, Python, AHK, and anything else that can run without a server. But now I'm on a small team and we're building a web app, which kinda throws a monkey-wrench into the usual Git workflow. This is because, to see our changes before we commit, we have to upload the code to the web server to test it (assuming there's server-side code in it, cuz there usually is).
So how do you guys handle the whole local repo/clone thing? I have a few ideas, but don't know which (if any) will work:
1. Each developer could have their own web server, but that seems like overkill and probably doesn't scale well.
2. Each developer could have their repo on different folders in the same server; this could work, but still comes with some problems; for one, we'd have to keep doing like we are already and write the code on the server (no local copies). This means we can't use editors like VS Code or whatever, and not everyone on the team is as comfortable on Linux as me (and even I got a lot to learn lol). But more importantly, if anything happens to that server, it's back to the drawing board - literally!
3. We've been talking about using Bitbucket, but that just makes things even more confusing. How does Bitbucket connect to our server? Can we see our changes on it somehow? Based on my experience with GitHub, I kinda feel like BitBucket doesn't actually solve the problem of where and how each developer's work will be done. It's definitely an improvement over the command-line for our Git newbies though.
4. There's also the kinda silly option of cloning to a local repo, then re-uploading it to (somewhere) to run it every time there are changes... sounds as inefficient as everyone having their own server, only goofier
So of course we've done a ton of Googling. I've been all over the web looking for some kind of standard solution to this problem, but there doesn't seem to be one. The closest thing I could get to a straight answer is "it depends on the team" - which makes sense and all but has nothing to do with this web-specific issue. So I figured the next logical step in this research would be to ask other developers.
Have any of you done collaborative web apps using Git? Where do you clone your repos? How do you run your code? These sound like super-simple questions, but there doesn't appear to be a super-simple answer, so any info on the subject would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!