[drtournier]

Solution works really well to databases which will not be updated frequently, like a standalone site.

Although one should be aware of one very important git behavior - git does not diff binary files (like SQLite dbs). That means 2 things:

1. Each db update will generate a new file in git, maintaining the whole old file in history, instead of the diff in bytes. This will accumulate a lot of clutter in the repo

2. As git does not diff binaries, there is a very small risk of corruption (especially if you work in multiple OSs, because of CRLF)

Ref - https://robinwinslow.uk/dont-ever-commit-binary-files-to-git

[phiresky]

Git does actually diff binaries and stores them very efficiently :) If you do a single small UPDATE in your db file git will only store the changed information. It's just kinda slow, and for most binary files the effort git spends to try and compute deltas for binary files is useless - which is why it has a bad reputation for binary files.

Note that the diffs that git shows you are completely unrelated to the deltas it uses to compress it's database - which are always "binary deltas" and not line-based diffs.

Also I'm not sure why you mean that db corruption possibility has something to do with whether or not it stores diffs?

[xucheng]

You can just store the database in text format (e.g. csv) in the git and turn it to SQLite db when building the website.

[laszlokorte]

Minor nitpick: Git does not store diffs for any file format but always the full file for each version. So it does not really matter that its binary (except for not being able to VIEW the diff, but I guess you could even implement a plugin for that) but just that it's a big file. Even a huge text file would be fully stored per version.

/edit: The sibling comments mentions that git can infact delta compress older commits for storage efficency. But my point was that git commits are not deltas but full snapshots.

[iudqnolq]

This is mostly correct. Git's core object model is snapshots, which can then optionally be compressed. That should be transparent though.

[tehbeard]

You are only gonna encounter corruption if u either a) messed up the gitconfig for line endings or b) named the database mydbfile.txt