Using Git with CFML

Today I was writing a little app that helps me keep up with my Todo list, since I wanted to have a web interface for some reporting into my tasks.

The issue is that my todo list is just a text file (and before you go saying there are various apps, I am happy with my text file ok? for various reasons which are not part of this post), so I built a nice web interface to it, but the problem is that since I can modify it, and whilst I was developing it I wanted a way to back this file up. I mean, whist I am coding this app, I might make mistakes and want to roll back.

So I got thinking of a way to do this and realised I do this every day anyway, using git!. So, I thought, for every change I do to the file, why not check it into its repository.

I fiddled about with cfexecute, which to be honest I haven't used much previously but I couldn't change the working directory, so, thanks to Tim Blair's post I managed to do the following:

// first of we set the command to call

cmd1 = "git add TODO.txt";

cmd2 = "git commit -m 'autobackup'";

// the environment variable is empty

envp = arraynew(1);

// and we want to run from a given "root"

path = "/Volumes/iDisk/Documents/TODO";

dir = createobject("java", "java.io.File").init(path);

// get the java runtime object

rt = createobject("java", "java.lang.Runtime").getRuntime();

// and make the exec call to run the command

rt.exec(cmd1, envp, dir);

rt.exec(cmd2, envp, dir);

</cfscript>

And that's it. Every time the file is changed, it is added to my git repo locally. Handy!