Automatically Deploying Website From Remote Git Repository
Before I start, I’ll just quickly run through where I put stuff on my server. Apache logs and config are in the ubuntu default folders: /var/log/apache2 and /etc/apache2/ respectively.
Websites: /home/caius/vhosts/<domain name>/htdocs
Git Repos: /home/caius/git/<domain name>.git
So I have a git repo locally, ~/projects/somesite.com/, and want to deploy it to my webserver. I’ll keep the git repo in ~/git/ and set it up so that when I push to the repo (over ssh) it will automatically checkout the new changes into the website’s htdocs folder.
I’m assuming DNS is already setup (or I’ve used ghost to map it locally.) And that I’ve setup the virtualhost in apache pointing at /home/caius/vhosts/somesite.com/htdocs and reloaded apache so the config is in place.
Remote Machine
We create a bare git repo, then point the working tree at the docroot of our website. This means all the git stuff is kept in the somesite.git folder, but the files themselves are checked out to the website’s folder. Then we setup a post-receive hook to update the worktree folder after new changes have been pushed to the repo.
$ cd git
$ mkdir somesite.git
$ cd somesite.git/
$ git init --bare
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/caius/git/somesite.git/
$ git --bare update-server-info
$ git config core.worktree /home/caius/vhosts/somesite.com/htdocs
$ git config core.bare false
$ git config receive.denycurrentbranch ignore
$ cat > hooks/post-receive
#!/bin/sh
git checkout -f
^D
$ chmod +x hooks/post-receive
Local Machine
And now on the client machine we add the remote repo as a git remote, and then push to it.
$ git remote add web ssh://myserver/home/caius/git/somesite.git
$ git push web +master:refs/heads/master
Counting objects: 3, done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 229 bytes, done.
Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To ssh://myserver/home/caius/git/somesite.git
* [new branch] master -> master
All Done
And now if you go to somesite.com you’ll see the contents of your git repo there. (somesite.com is just an example url though, I don’t actually own it!)