How to Git Open Atrium

UPDATE: "Open Atrium has moved from its single monolitic repository to an install profile and a drush make based build system. This is a change that primarily effects developers. The complete, ready to install, download will continue to be offered at http://openatrium.com". Details here. Thanks, Jeff.

I've been playing around with the Open Atrium project (Features rule!), which is a very cool Drupal-based intranet distribution created by those smarty-pants over at Development Seed.

I went to download the latest version, but noticed that (as of December 31) it hadn't been updated with the latest version of Drupal core. Now I usually pull updates from the Drupal community via CVS while keeping whatever project I'm working on in Subversion, so I was looking for a way to do so for Open Atrium.

It turns out that the project repository is hosted at GitHub. Using Git to pull down the latest version of Open Atrium turned out to be pretty easy. Here's how I did it.

Installing Git

The following steps apply to installing on a Debian-based Linux distro, which is fine if you use it as your desktop or if you like VirtualBox as much as I do.

1. From the command line, install Git as follows:
   [chrisng@lampbuntu:~] sudo apt-get install git-core
2. Next navigate over to where you want to put the project, and pull down the project:[chrisng@lampbuntu:~/public_html] git clone git://github.com/developmentseed/Atrium.git
3. A folder named "Atrium" is created that contains the ready-to-use web application. That's it.

Updating Open Atrium

Now all I have to do to update to the latest code base is (from inside the project directory):
[chrisng@lampbuntu:~/public_html/Atrium] git pull
Already up-to-date.

All there's left to do is to import everything into a Subversion repository to capture all the great customizations you are going to make to your project!