I would like to start updating vimbadmin with git. Advice needed

I just finished setting up a new debian 8 server with mail stack. I would like to start checking out new versions of vimbadmin with git. Since the easy engine installs vimbadmin from a zip file I have to somehow initialize the vimbadmin directory and add the origin.

I have found this thread on stack overflow. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15681643/how-to-clone-git-repository-from-its-zip

So

unzip <repo>.zip #done already by ee
cd /var/www/22222/htdocs/vimbadmin/
git init
git add.
git remote add origin https://github.com/opensolutions/ViMbAdmin.git
git remote update
git checkout master

Is there a gotcha that I am missing? What would my .gitignore file look like as to keep /var/www/22222/htdocs/vimbadmin/application/configs/ file from being over written?

I am not comfortable enough with git or the tools used by vimbadmin like composer to be confident this is going to work out.

Has anyone successfully pulled this off? My last server saw vimbadmin become outdated as the further I fell behind the more frightening updating vimbadmin became so I just ignored it.

Should I just stick with the zip downloads?

regards