“Hello Open edX Community! 
Our team of 3 devs is customizing Open edX devstack (lilac) by cloning from the GitHub repo. We’re seeking advice on the best approach to collaborate among ourselves—how to set up a central repo for our trio, sync our work without contributing to the master branch, and also insights on deploying with NGINX. Your expertise is highly valued! #OpenEdX #DevCollaboration #DeploymentAdvice”
Hi! Is there a reason you’re using the Lilac release? It is 4 major versions behind the latest (soon to be 5). It no longer receives security updates and there have been major changes to the platform since then that you’ll need to catch up on.
Can you elaborate on that? I generally recommend the opposite - get involved with and contribute to the master branch, and keep your fork (your unique changes) as small as possible. Otherwise it will become very expensive to maintain over the years. If you want custom functionality, it’s best to implement it as plugins, custom frontends, and custom microservices, rather than changing the core codebase directly.