Do I have to commit the downloadable assets for Unity to the repo? Or a reference for the team to download them?

Question

QUESTION (Short version)

I am going to use the Unity Test Tools asset to do unitary testing. Q: Do I have to commit the Unity Test Tools to my repo? (using git, by the way).

CONTEXT

Team / Workflow

• We are an indie team of 10 people (of which 4 coders, 2 graphics, 1 music, 2 marketing, 1 automation-test QA), remotely located.
• We built the team 2 weeks ago, have explored Unity, decided that unity shall be our devel framework, and finally we did an internal silly tic-tac-toe internal for us to check the workflow.
• Now we want to start developing our 1st game. Clean code. Clean repo.
• Using git for version control.
• We configured Unity to write all forced in text and visible metas.
• We are using Unity5 free edition.

Coding

• Up to now, I've managed to create a MVC schema. MonoBehaviour acts as the Controller and then we have non-dependant classes that act as the Model of our game. The controller calls methods of this model. The model throws events to notify the changes in its state.
• We want to unit-test the model.

Assets

• Yesterday I discovered the Unity Test Tools.
• This is the only downloaded asset, the rest of the assets are made by us.
• The wonderings presented by this question may happen again if we download other assets or if we want to keep a common own-made library across several games.

QUESTIONS (Long version)

As far as I've seen, assets get "copied" into your project. Okey for working. But... comitting?? I'm feeling uncomfortable.

The same way in PHP you may use composer to handle "dependencies" so if you need a library you do not commit it inside your project, you just commit a text file saying "I want this library, this specific version" -for the sake of example, you can tell composer to install PHPUnit for unit testing, and you commit the composer text file, you do not commmit a full copy of PHPUnit-, these are our questions/wonderings:

Q1) Do I have to commit all the Unity Test Tools in my repo? It is 10 Megas - may seem an overkill or not, depending on your optics... but, as it carries "examples" and I don't know how to filter what is needed and what not, it seems so overkill to me to commit all of it - but worse: this might happen with another asset that is 500 Megas for example. Committing downloadable assets seems anti-pattern. Do I have to commit?

Q2) Or it is better that I don't, and have all the members in the team to manually download the Unity Test Tools?

Q3) If they delete that repo and download it again, the Unity Test Tools seem to be kept local to the project, then a new download is imposed if it's not kept in the repo? Or Unity may store "local in your computer; still global to your projects" things like "the testing library" you are likely going to use in several projects?

Q4) Case one thinks "maybe each project needs its own version of libraries, best practice is do not keep anything global" then, committing them to the project still seems overkill... is there any standard of "config file" that I can place and then once the "git repo" is cloned, run some kind of "dependency installer" or so (much like the composer install action is to a recently cloned repo in PHP)?

I've seeked for information, but I'm still confused on this. I've seen it exists something like an "asset manager" but I'm not sure if this is what I need. Any pointer to documentation I must read will be highly appreciated.

Note that the documentation in Unity website, as for example this one: Mastering Unity Project Folder Structure - Version Control Systems does not address my specific question.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I haven't worked with the asset in question but I work on a small hobbyist unity team and have faced a somewhat similar situation.

As assets may change quite a bit between versions I have found it is easier to keep an asset version I know works in the repo. If the asset is updated then I can download it, check that it still works, possibly update the project so it does and then commit.

As you mention your asset has a lot of stuff that is of little interest to you. You'll often find example scenes with unnecessary art assets, scripts etc when you download assets. I prefer to remove everything I don't need, not so much to save space, mostly to keep everything "clean" or you will have classes with conflicting names, three sets of redundant animations for "jump" etc.

I am in no way an expert in version control so I can't say what is "an antipattern" or not or what is the industry standard, just what I have found to work through trial and error...