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Question: When merging dev into main, how do I keep them .ebextensions and .elasticbeanstalk commited on their respective branches but never overwriting each other during merges?

Requirement: I wish to checkout new topic branches from dev and merge them back into dev, so these topic branches will need the same .ebextensions and .elasticbeanstalk folders to come with them.

Landscape: Working with Github on Flask project for Elastic beanstalk.

I have two primary branches

  • main
  • dev

I have dev set up for one Elastic beanstalk environment, and main set up in another. This means I have two different versions of the .ebextensions and .elasticbeanstalk folders.

.
├── application.py
├── .ebextensions
├── .ebignore
├── .elasticbeanstalk
├── .gitignore
├── main.py
└── .vscode

I keep messing up the files and having to write them back in locally and push to remote again to fix them.

Having read about a third of git-scm.com's book so I think the solution will involve "onbranch:" includeIf but the example is hard to follow.

Surely I've missed something, it can't be an uncommon requirement.

beautysleep
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    It's not obvious, but this is in fact a [Frequently Asked Question](https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Git_FAQ#How_do_I_tell_Git_to_ignore_tracked_files.3F), whose answer is really "you can't do that". Come up with some other approach: e.g., don't store those files under *those names* at all. Instead, when you *deploy* a release, copy or rename the appropriate set of files into place. – torek Jun 03 '22 at 11:52

2 Answers2

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It seems you already found a possible workaround, but I'd like to propose an alternative solution in which you set Git to never overwrite specific files.

This can be done by creating a .gitattributes file with a pattern matching your files, and then creating a dummy merge strategy.

A more in-depth discussion for this approach can be found here, with some more information here.

I believe that in your case you could do something along the lines of

git config --global merge.ours.driver true
echo ".ebextensions/* merge=ours" >> .gitattributes
echo ".elasticbeanstalk/* merge=ours" >> .gitattributes

Please do note that I'm not sure if passing a hole directory with a wildcard will work, though I imagine it should be possible.

Decclo
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When you do actions in Git, nearly all of them only add data to the Git database was a line I read but didn't apply when trying to resolve this issue.

Thanks to @torek for clarifying.

My summary solution is store all the files

So now my file structure looks like

.
├── application.py
├── .ebextensions-dev
├── .ebextensions-main
├── .ebignore
├── .elasticbeanstalk-dev
├── .elasticbeanstalk-main
├── .gitignore
├── main.py
└── .vscode

When I want to deploy the application to the dev Elastic beanstalk environment:

  1. Remove the -dev from the end of the .ebextensions-dev and .elasticbeanstalk-dev folder names.
files='.elasticbeanstalk .ebextensions'
x='-dev'
for i in $files; do
    mv $i$x $i
done;
  1. Run eb deploy
  2. Add the -dev back onto the end of the .ebextensions and .elasticbeanstalk folder names.
files='.elasticbeanstalk .ebextensions'
x='-dev'
for i in $files; do
    mv $i $i$x
done;

vica-versa for main

beautysleep
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