title: How to separate application from data in a good manner?
body: <p>During development of my php-app I've stored all data that the app produces within the app-folder and hence the data being part of my git-repo. The root of the repo is also the webroot. This has worked well for me during the beginning of development and it sort of made sense at the time to commit the app together with the data.</p>
  
  <p>But I feel this needs to be redone now for several reasons. One being that the data-size is getting too big for me to comfortable store it in the git-repo.
  Another is that I simply do not need to have a snapshot of the data for a given commit.
  The main-reason, I guess is that I've deployed my app to my NAS(synology) for real use, and I push commits to it via webdav. And to my knowledge of git, it's not possible or at least not practical to do pushes while leaving certain data in the remote-repo untouched.</p>
  
  <p>Also, it would be nice though not necessary if both the app on the nas and the app on my computer, while testing has access to the same data-directory. This made me think of moving the data out from the app-directory and access it via ftp. But I'm not sure that would be a good idea, especially since all the "real" access to the files would be from the very same device, the nas.</p>
  
  <p>What would be a good structure and file access methods etc for this?</p>