Using Git to deploy a website

I recently redid my personal website and ended up deploying it to both my personal domain and my UT website. In order to facilitate development and deployment I set up Git post-receive hooks on my servers so I could update my website with one command: git push web. This post will explain how you can do the same.

Setting up git locally

The first step is to git track the local copy of your website (only required if you haven’t already initialized git on the local copy)

Using your favorite shell, navigate to the local copy of website on your computer and start git

git init
git add .
git commit -a -m "First commit!"

You have now initialized git, tracked your files, and committed your work!

Setting up git on server

Assuming you have a web server that you can ssh into we can the proceed on the server

cd ~
mkdir deploy.git
cd deploy.git
git init --bare

This will create a folder and initialize a barebones git repository within.

We then create a post-receive hook that will be called whenever you deploy and will update the latest version of your website

cd hooks

Then use your favorite text editor (vim, emacs, nano, etc…) to create ‘post-receive’ that will contain the following:

#!/bin/sh
GIT_WORK_TREE=~/public_html/ git checkout -f
chmod -f -R o+x ~/public_html

The first line specifies that this is bash executable

The second line sets the GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable to wherever your public html files are located (usually in /var/www or ~/public_html)

The third line is optional, it gives the “others” group permission to execute files. This is a failsafe to ensure that apache can execute .php files.

In order to activate this hook, we must make it executable

chmod +x post-receive

Pushing to server

Returning to the local copy of the website

git remote add web username@yourserver:~/deploy.git
git push web +master:refs/heads/master

That’s it!

Deployment workflow

Deploying to your website is now a breeze! Your typical development workflow will be

Edit files like you normally would
git add . (if you create new files)
git commit -a -m "your message" to commit your changes
git push web to deploy!
Rinse and repeat