Deploy a project using Git push

Question

Is it possible to deploy a website using git push? I have a hunch it has something to do with using git hooks to perform a git reset --hard on the

Answer 1

We use capistrano for managing deploy. We build capistrano to deploy on a staging server, and then running a rsync with all of ours server.

cap deploy
cap deploy:start_rsync (when the staging is ok)

With capistrano, we can made easy rollback in case of bug

cap deploy:rollback
cap deploy:start_rsync

Answer 2

I am using the following solution by toroid.org, which has a simpler hook script.

on the server:

$ mkdir website.git && cd website.git
$ git init --bare
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/ams/website.git/

and install the hook on the server:

$ mkdir /var/www/www.example.org
$ cat > hooks/post-receive
#!/bin/sh
GIT_WORK_TREE=/var/www/www.example.org git checkout -f
GIT_WORK_TREE=/var/www/www git clean -f -d # clean directory from removed files

$ chmod +x hooks/post-receive

on your client:

$ mkdir website && cd website
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/ams/website/.git/
$ echo 'Hello, world!' > index.html
$ git add index.html
$ git commit -q -m "The humble beginnings of my web site."

$ git remote add web ssh://server.example.org/home/ams/website.git
$ git push web +master:refs/heads/master

then to publish, just type

$ git push web

There is a full description on the website: http://toroid.org/ams/git-website-howto

Answer 3

After many false starts and dead ends, I'm finally able to deploy website code with just "git push remote" thanks to this article.

The author's post-update script is only one line long and his solution doesn't require .htaccess configuration to hide the Git repo as some others do.

A couple of stumbling blocks if you're deploying this on an Amazon EC2 instance;

1) If you use sudo to create the bare destination repository, you have to change the owner of the repo to ec2-user or the push will fail. (Try "chown ec2-user:ec2-user repo.")

2) The push will fail if you don't pre-configure the location of your amazon-private-key.pem, either in /etc/ssh/ssh_config as an IdentityFile parameter or in ~/.ssh/config using the "[Host] - HostName - IdentityFile - User" layout described here...

...HOWEVER if Host is configured in ~/.ssh/config and different than HostName the Git push will fail. (That's probably a Git bug)

Answer 4

dont install git on a server or copy the .git folder there. to update a server from a git clone you can use following command:

git ls-files -z | rsync --files-from - --copy-links -av0 . user@server.com:/var/www/project

you might have to delete files which got removed from the project.

this copies all the checked in files. rsync uses ssh which is installed on a server anyways.

the less software you have installed on a server the more secure he is and the easier it is to manage it's configuration and document it. there is also no need to keep a complete git clone on the server. it only makes it more complex to secure everything properly.

Answer 5

For Deployment Scenario

In our scenario we're storing the code on github/bitbucket and want to deploy to live servers. In this case the following combination works for us (that is a remix of the highly upvoted answers here):

1. Copy over your .git directory to your web server
2. On your local copy git remote add live ssh://user@host:port/folder
3. On remote: git config receive.denyCurrentBranch ignore

4. On remote: nano .git/hooks/post-receive and add this content:

   #!/bin/sh GIT_WORK_TREE=/var/www/vhosts/example.org git checkout -f

5. On remote: chmod +x .git/hooks/post-receive

6. Now you can push there with git push live

Notes

• This solution works with older git versions (tested with 1.7 and 1.9)
• You need to make sure pushing to github/bitbucket first, so you'll have a consistent repo on live

• If your .git folder is within document root make sure you hide it from the outside by adding to .htaccess (source):

  RedirectMatch 404 /\..*$

Answer 6

Sounds like you should have two copies on your server. A bare copy, that you can push/pull from, which your would push your changes when you're done, and then you would clone this into you web directory and set up a cronjob to update git pull from your web directory every day or so.