Git Deployment for Websites

I’ve been developing web applications for multiple clients for years now, and I’ve always been frustrated by the deployment process. Remembering FTP usernames and passwords, attempting to sync with the server, the non-existent merge assistance, and the occasional crisis of lost files, it’s just a nightmare. Or rather it was a nightmare until I started using git for my deployment. Now, I keep a clone of my sites repository on my server, setup a post-update commit hook, and I don’t even have to think about deploying anymore. Simply add, commit, push, and relax.

If you're interested in a similar setup, here's how you can get started.

How-To

Server Setup

First, ssh into the server you'd like to deploy to and create a nice space for your code to live.

ssh patrick@my-cool-ec2-server-ip
mkdir -p /var/www/my-website.git
mkdir -p /var/www/my-website

You'll notice how we created two separate directories here. That's because we're going to setup a bare repository. In most of the git repos you've worked with before, you've probably had a .git directory within the code that you're working on. That's the raw git data, where git stores the commit history, branches, etc, while the parent directory is the actual code, your working directory. In a bare repository, the .git directory is separated from the working directory which helps us keep the git data separate from the actual copy of the code that's deployed to the server.

Next, we'll initialize the bare repository.

cd /var/www/my-website.git
git init --bare
cat <<EOF > hooks/post-receive
#!/bin/bash

export GIT_WORK_TREE=/var/www/my-website

git checkout -f

cd $GIT_WORK_TREE && ls -alh

echo "Deployment complete!"
EOF
chmod +x hooks/post-receive

You'll notice we added a post-receive hook to the repo. This is the script that will be triggered whenever a new commit is "deployed" (pushed). In our case, we check out the latest code into the deployment directory, and then run you can optionally run any additional deployment commands (like npm install, restart services, etc). There's a lot of flexibility here so feel free to customize it to your situation but this is a good starting point.

Client Setup

Now, we'll setup the client side. This is how we'll push our code to the server.

git remote add production ssh://patrick@my-cool-ec2-server-ip:/var/www/my-website.git

That's it! Now, you can push your code to the server.

git push production master

Profit

With this setup, deploying code is as easy as committing your changes and running git push. Say goodbye to the headaches of FTP or manual synchronization and enjoy the simplicity of git-powered deployments!