Change the way magento2 is installed so its upgradeable

Question

There are many ways to install magento2, deploying from GIT, Downloading from magentocommerce or doing a composer installation.

What i find odd is that those 3 different ways of installing result in 3 different structures. One where the files are in app/code/magento and the other in vendor/magento/

Also one where you can use the upgrade and connect wizard in the backend, and the other where you can do a easy composer update.

What i did a while back since composer kept failing on my dev location, is a git deploy which went smooth but now gives me a hard time updating. Having some dependencies installed from composer, but still stuck on 2.0.0.

Whats the best way to proceed, and whats normally the best-practice way to install, i'd say composer, but not sure what the community thinks. You guys think a fresh install, migration of extensions and theme + adding my DB is the right way to proceed? For now its not running that smooth.

For example what i did now is i made a fresh install via composer, looks the most clean to be honest. Connected it to my existing 2.0.0 db and did

bin/magento setup:upgrade
bin/magento setup:di:compile

but then the next errors pop-up

a:4:{i:0;s:1755:"Please upgrade your database: Run "bin/magento setup:upgrade" from the Magento root directory.
The following modules are outdated:
Magento_Theme schema: current version - 2.0.1, required version - 2.0.0
Magento_Theme data: current version - 2.0.1, required version - 2.0.0
Magento_Customer schema: current version - 2.0.7, required version - 2.0.6
Magento_Customer data: current version - 2.0.7, required version - 2.0.6
Magento_Cms schema: current version - 2.0.1, required version - 2.0.0
Magento_Cms data: current version - 2.0.1, required version - 2.0.0
....

Answer 1

Think about it as installing Magento as different roles.

• We talk about contributing developers as anyone who wants to contribute to the CE codebase.

• We talk about integrators as anyone who understands Composer enough to be able to update the Magento software using the command-line if desired.

• We talk about the easy installation as the lowest common denominator; in that case, you download a compressed archive. You can do this if you have shared hosting with no access to a command shell.

Of those three, there are only two file system structures: one that has components under app/code (contributing developer) and one that has components under vendor (the other two).

In all respects, the Composer installation and the compressed archive installation are identical. You can upgrade either one using the command line or the Setup Wizard.

Upgrading Magento as a contributing developer involves Git as well.