Git Deployments

For the past year or so I have been using Rsync to deploy my sites, which has worked perfectly for me until recently.

I have recently switched to using a simple post-receive hook using a bare repo on the server. I find this works a lot better for me now as it means all I need to do is "push".

First, you need to set up the repo on your server, I normally set it up in /var/git/site.com for example. This will be a bare git repo, so it will not contain any of your own code. To set this up simply run the following inside your /var/git/site.com folder:

git init --bare

This will initialize the repository, allowing you to push your code to it.

The next step is to tell git where to check your code out too. I usually use /var/www/site.com. For this, I use a very simple post-receive hook that checks the code out to the folder and runs composer install. You would place the following in /var/git/site.com/hooks/post-receive :

WORKING_DIR=/var/www/site.com;
GIT_WORK_TREE=$WORKING_DIR git checkout -f;
cd $WORKING_DIR && composer install -o;

One thing to remember is to make the file executable by running the following command:

chmod +x /var/git/site.com/hooks/post-receive

Now that the repo and post-receive hooks are setup, we need to set up your development machine's git remotes. The easiest way to do this is:

git remote add production [e-mail]:/var/git/site.com

This will mean that you can simply run the following command to deploy your website:

git push production master

You can obviously add anything else you wish to the post-receive hook, such as clearing cache, flushing cdn etc. I currently have most of mine set to restart php-fpm after composer install.

service php5-fpm restart

If you have any questions, or I have missed anything, then please let me know below.