Do a "git diff" between two directories due to website owner making live changes

Question

I have a project I'm working on which I've set up in a git repo.

Since I put my latest version live, the website owner has made some changes to the working/content by overwriting it directly.

Obviously these changes were made outside of version control. I suppose I could overwrite the entire contents of my repo, then commit. That should work... but I don't really like the idea of doing that, especially if there's been any replacement of correct code/html-structure with stuff that's incorrect or bad practice.

What I'd like to do is dump the website from live into another directory and do a recursive diff so I can only overwrite those files which have changed (any correct any issues if there are any)

Answer 1

As in if I just overwrite what's in my git repo, then run git status?

No, you don't have to overwrite anything.

You can do a diff between:

• the index representing your site in its latest versioned state (in the git repo)
• a dump of the current live site (a copy done in a different folder, not under version control)

You can then do (using git options) a:

git diff --git-dir=/path/to/repo/.git --work-tree=/path/to/dump .

You actually can execute that command from any folder: it will look for the git index and for the right working tree.

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The OP Tom Busby adds in the comments:

In the end I solved it by simply overwriting the .git folder in my dump directory with the one from my git repo and running git diff.

Answer 2

VonC's answer is excellent, but I believe you could also just use the diff command (a built-in command on most operating systems). This would also ensure that "gitignored" files were diffed (though VonC's might already do that).

Assuming the website in /www/mysite and a fresh clone in /git/mysite you could just do:

diff /www/mysite /git/mysite

Answer 3

Yes We can compare two directories very easily

simply using this command on Shell/Terminal

git diffdir any-branch-name any-other-branch-name