Deploy your website with Git

Goal: deploy your website by running a simple command on your computer.

Before pushing changes to production you'd like to check that everything looks alright. Let's suppose that the staging server where you preview your changes is also hosted on the same production server. This works well with simple or static websites.

/var/www/domain.com
/var/www/domain.com/production
/var/www/domain.com/staging
/var/www/domain.com/repository.git

Remote git repository setup

Create an empty git repository

mkdir -p /var/www/domain.com/repository.git
cd /var/www/domain.com/repository.git
git init --bare

Add a script, called a hook, that'll be executed when there's incoming changes

cat > hooks/post-receive <<END
#!/bin/bash

set -e

BASE=/var/www/domain.com

while read oldrev newrev refname
do
    branch=$(git rev-parse --symbolic --abbrev-ref $refname)

    BRANCH_DIR="$BASE/$branch"
    BRANCH_TEMP_DIR="$BASE/$branch.temp"

    rm -rf $BRANCH_TEMP_DIR
    mkdir -p $BRANCH_TEMP_DIR
    cd $BRANCH_TEMP_DIR

    git --work-tree=$BRANCH_TEMP_DIR --git-dir=$BASE/repository.git checkout $branch -f

    # run your custom commands here

    rm -rf $BRANCH_DIR
    mv $BRANCH_TEMP_DIR $BRANCH_DIR
done
END

Make sure it can be executed

chmod +x hooks/post-receive

Local setup

Let's suppose all your changes are on the master branch.

Add a new remote to your repository

git remote add server ssh://user@host/var/www/domain.com/repository.git

So then just do

git push server master:staging

If everything looks alright

git push server master:production

Different servers

Your hook is very simple because you're probably going to use just one main branch e.g. master.

cat > hooks/post-receive <<END
#!/bin/bash
set -e
BASE=/var/www/domain.com
cd $BASE
git --work-tree=$BASE/public --git-dir=$BASE/repository.git checkout master -f
# run your custom commands here
END

Add remotes for each server

git remote add production ssh://user@production-host/var/www/domain.com/repository.git
git remote add staging ssh://user@staging-host/var/www/domain.com/repository.git

To push changes to production

git push production

To push changes to staging

git push staging