Testing/previewing Github branches on a dev server

Question

I\'ve just moved from svn to github. Me and my team run local tests and we commit changes and test on a central dev server. Whenever we push changes to the repos I would like to

Answer 1

Here is part of the answer to my own question...

I wanted the team to be able to fork the code and instantly be able to show it on a url like this : http://branch-name.devserver.com

I set up vhost directives in apache conf to map sub domains to folders :

        ServerName www.devserver.com
        ServerAlias *.devserver.com
        VirtualDocumentRoot /var/www/devserver/%1/

I branch the code in github or on my local machine.
Then run these commands on the dev server

cd /var/www/devserver
git clone git@github.com:/user-name/repos-name

Move the cloned repos folder to a folder named the branch name so it becomes the root folder of the subdomain virtual host.

mv repos-name new-branch

Then switch the repos from master to the new branch

cd /var/www/devserver/new-branch
git checkout new-branch

It's now available on http://new-branch.devserver.com

Then after I've pushed changes to the branch on github - I pull them on the dev server

cd /var/www/devserver/new-branch
git pull

Now - if I want the pull to happen automatically I could setup a CI server to listen for a git hub hook which would trigger a pull in each branches folder. Looks like Hudson could do this.

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I'd hoped to find a smarter way to do this :

1. Without cloning the repos many times
2. With a single command that updates all branches efficiently or a hook that lets me pull to only the branch that was updated
3. With a decent folder structure for each branch - so I could test any branch on a specific url without having to mess about with http config every time I branch the code
4. possibly automatically creating a root folder for new branches so that they would magically appear on the dev server

Any further thoughts welcome...