Can I use git to version control Adobe Animate project

Question

Am just wondering if Git is appropriate to use as a version control for Adobe Animate projects.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can version all kind of files in Git (binaries too!), so there is no problem to version an Adobe Animate project in theory.

Answer 2

The question is 3 years old at this point, but for anyone else coming across this, as YoannFleuryDev pointed out, you CAN add .fla files, and other binaries to git, so technically, you can version control Adobe Animate projects. Depending on your workflow however, you may run into issues.

For example, you can't easily do a diff between your previous commit, and the current state of your working directory, so checking what you changed before you commit it, or doing a partial commit (git add -p FILE.fla) is not going to work. The best you can do is do a diff on the resulting .html and/or .js files, which will give you a rough idea of what changed, but won't help you with the .fla itself.

Also, if you use git branches, if your project diverges, where your branch has some changes to the .fla, and another branch (either yours, or someone else's) has other changes to the same .fla, resolving conflicts is going to need to be done manually, which can be a massive pain.

I have an Adobe Animate project that is git version controlled, and it is a constant source of frustration that I can't do a diff, or a merge. The only reason this works at all for me is because I'm the only developer working on this project. Without the ability to do merging, working with someone else on the same file would be insanely difficult, or impossible.

Another thing to keep in mind is that while text (source code that git is usually used to store) is very easy to compress, which git does transparently, a .fla file is harder to compress, so your overall project size can grow very quickly. You may want to look at git lfs if you find this being a problem for your project.