Trying to set up dev / staging environment for EE on Nexcess hosting

Question

So, as a precursor - I'm new to using Git and the FocusLab Master Config and having a few issues getting set up. I'm using a Nexcess shared EEP-100 account.

If I follow everyone's advice on developing with Git, my ideal setup should have a staging or development branch / site alongside the live site so I can push and test changes first before merging and pushing to production and understand that all environments must have the same structure in order to work correctly and herein is my problem…

If I create a secondary domain on the Nexcess account it gets its own folder with web root (html) etc contained and everything works as advertised but this requires a full domain not a subdomain.

When I create a sub-domain the target folder is added to the web root of the primary domain so my set up is not going to be consistent with the local and production environments and i'd be installing everything at web root - in which instance all the base paths etc will be wrong.

How does everyone deal with this when setting up Git / EE?

Answer 1

Strictly speaking, this isn't an issue with either EE or Git, but just a quirk in the Siteworx hosting control panel that Nexcess uses. You can get around it by, instead of adding a subdomain to one of the domains you already configured in the panel, you add it as a new "secondary domain". To do this, go to Hosting Features -> Domains -> Secondary. Enter the full (sub)domain you want to use for the staging site in the first input box: e.g. "sub.domain.com". Siteworx doesn't check or care that you previously used "domain.com", it just goes ahead and creates a new webroot on the server, where you can deploy your development site.