This git repository helps you get up and running quickly w/ a Magento installation on OpenShift Express. It will be a clean installation where you will need to accept the license agreement as well as configure your database connectivity and configure the admin user account.

Create an account at http://openshift.redhat.com/

Create a php-5.3 application (you can call your application whatever you want)

rhc-create-app -a magento -t php-5.3

Add MySQL support to your application

rhc-ctl-app -a magento -e add-mysql-5.1

Add this upstream Magento repo

cd magento 
git remote add upstream -m master git://github.com/openshift/magento-example.git
git pull -s recursive -X theirs upstream master
# note that the git pull above can be used later to pull updates to Magento

Then push the repo upstream

git push

That's it, you can now checkout your application at:

http://magento-$yournamespace.rhcloud.com

NOTES:

GIT_ROOT/.openshift/action_hooks/deploy: This script is executed with every 'git push'.
Feel free to modify this script to learn how to use it to your advantage. By default, this script will create the database tables that this example uses. If you need to modify the schema, you could create a file GIT_ROOT/.openshift/action_hooks/alter.sql and then use GIT_ROOT/.openshift/action_hooks/deploy to execute that script (make sure to back up your application + database w/ rhc-snapshot first :) )

The initialization steps will make changes to the files on the server side. To pull those to your local repo, you can run

rhc-snapshot -a magento 

from your client, explode the resulting tar.gz and pull all the files from magento/repo/php back to your local magento/php directory. It's always a good idea to take a snapshot every now and then.