Upgrading MovableType with the help of Git

Created 7/25/2007, updated 3/12/20242 minute read

Just got this query via email and thought I’d post my answer here for others to see:

I’ve recently switched from using svn to git, and I’m about to switch from using WordPress to MovableType too.

I’ve read your previous blog posts on upgrading WordPress using svn, and they were really helpful.

It’ll be great if you could write an article on upgrading MovableType using git for us newbies.

The reason why I never used to upgrade my Movable Type via Subversion is that Six Apart (the makers of Movable Type) don’t provide public access to their version control system; they instead distribute new releases of Movable Type as tarballs or zip archives.

As such, it wasn’t possible to update an existing, customized install using Subversion (see "Upgrading WordPress using Subversion"). I did make some notes on making the upgrade as smooth as possible with the aid of things like Interarchy’s "mirror upload" feature (see "Movable Type upgrade notes"), but it was never going to be as convenient as a Subversion-based upgrade.

But Git is a distributed version control system so it offers the possibility of doing some tricks that you just can’t do with Subversion.

I haven’t tried this out yet, it is untested, but I think that you might be able to use the following workflow:

Grab the Movable Type source, extract the archive, and use it to initialize a brand new Git repository.

unzip MT-first-version.zip
mv MT-first-version mt_vendor
cd mt_vendor
git init
git add .
git commit

Perform your customizations on a separate branch in a separate, cloned repository:

cd ..
git clone mt_vendor mt_mine
cd mt_mine
git co -b my_custom_install --track

Whenever a new release comes out update the repository by extracting the archive, overwriting all the old files (but leaving the .git directory intact) and performing a git commit -a.

# switch back to vendor repo
cd ../mt_vendor

# remove all the files from the previous version
rm -r *

# extract the new files
unzip MT-new-version.zip
mv MT-new-version/* .
rmdir MT-new-version
rm MT-new-version.zip

# commit changes
git commit -a

Now merge the changes into your customized install

cd ../mt_mine
git pull origin master

I’m not sure whether this is better than the download/extract/upload cycle, but merging with Git should be much more straightforward than merging with your SFTP client… Of course, it would still be a lot easier if Six Apart offered Subversion, Git or even CVS access to a repository containing the public releases.

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