I have a project in development that I’m working on and I frequently switch between two computers. I am including my sqlite file in git and so far it’s been fine but I’ve heard in the past that git doesn’t do well with binary? Has anyone actually had issues doing this?
I decided to perform a dump just in case so i dont have to start from scratch if something does go wrong.
The problem is mainly that the size of your git repo blows up really quick with regularly changing binary files. Also, merge conflicts exist but I think git would just make you choose which binary to keep.
Export the data and structure in SQL. SQL is plain text and suitable for git.
If data can be seeded easily only export the structure and git control it.
In Rails framework, schema file and seed file are used for structure and data.
Git is mainly tracking and saving changes, which works great for text, but not that well for data (especially binary). You won’t lose your data, but the Git repo will keep growing too fast.
The big question here is: How often does the data change? If you just use it as a convenient format and rarely change things, it should be fine. Though as mentioned: It might make sense to export to SQL before putting it in Git then. As long as the size is reasonable too (Not storing gigabytes of data).
Alternatives can be other sync services (Dropbox, Seafile, …) to keep your Git repo lean or even better: Set up a SQL server so the data is always in the same spot. Of course that depends on if you have internet everywhere you work (but you probably do).
