Chili Pepper Design

Web development relleno

Deploying Code With Git

| Comments

This past year I finally committed (heh) to using Git. One of the reasons was using it’s distributed architecture for easy-peasy remote code deployment to multiple remote environments. It has been a wonderful change which has made my life much easier, so I thought I would write up a blog post about it.

First let me just say that deploying with any kind of version control system (VCS) is a nice step up from deploying with an old school file transfer (e.g. FTP). Here are couple of reasons why deploying with Git is nice:

  1. Fast, differential file transfer (only updates modified files)
  2. Easy to rollback to previous code
  3. Git “hook” scripts can run additional deployment tasks (see last Pro-Tip below)

There are a couple drawbacks to using pure Git to deploy however:

  1. Git does not track file permissions, which could cause problems if some files or directories need special permissions
  2. Git does not track empty directories. If you want it to, you have to use the hacky trick of placing an empty .gitignore in any empty directories you want to deploy
  3. No built in database deployment and migration tools

For many purposes however it is a nice, simple solution that falls between basic file transfers and more advanced deployment options (mentioned at the end).

Strategy #1: SSH in to server, then git pull

This was the first and simplest thing I tried. If SSH is set up with a key so there’s no need to enter a password, it’s actually pretty quick. cd in to the repo and git pull to update your code - just like you would locally. You are already logged on to your server in case you need to do anything else too. Rolling back is as easy as git checkout.

But this is not as automagical as we can get with Git. You can do all this with SVN! Moving on…

Strategy #2: Push to bare remote repo with post-receive hook

Now we are getting somewhere - pushing code without SSHing on to the server! This is one of the beautiful things about Git: it’s distributed (decentralized), so you can set up a repository on another server and push changes to it, just like you push changes to your central code repository. Even better, you can set up multiple remote repos, so you can easily push code to testing and development environments as well.

We are going to do three things:

  1. Set up a bare repo on the remote server in a secure directory (not the webroot)
    A “bare” repo means that this repo does not have a checked out “head”, and will only be used to push to (not be committed to).
  2. Set up a post-receive hook on the remote server which will checkout the latest code
    The Git hook will checkout the latest pushed code to the work tree which we define (the webroot). The reason we keep the git repo and the work tree (website files) separate is so our .git files are not accidentally made public on the server. The separation also makes it easier to do things to your code without messing with your repository (like make backups or symlinks, or delete it).
  3. Set up a remote endpoint on the local machine so we can push to the new remote repo
    Finally we are going to create a Git remote endpoint locally, so we can push code to the remote server.

Note: The following tutorial assumes you have your code already in a Git repo on your local machine, and you can SSH to your remote server.

On remote machine:

To get started, SSH on to the remote server you want to deploy to. Then set up a bare Git repo on the remote machine, like so:

$ mkdir website.git
$ cd website.git
$ git init --bare

This creates a new empty repository in the website.git directory. Then create a post-receive hook by copying the sample one, and open it with your favorite text editor:

$ cp hooks/post-receive.sample hooks/post-receive
$ vim hooks/post-receive

Add the following line to the post-receive file (it should have #!/bin/sh at the top):

GIT_WORK_TREE=/path/to/webroot/of/website git checkout -f

This file will run after the repo has received (post-receive, see?) new code from a git push. It will checkout the latest code that was pushed (-f forces it to, even if there are local changes) into the GIT_WORK_TREE we are declaring (which is our website webroot).

Regardless which of the two techniques you use above, make sure your post-receive hook is executable so it will run properly:

$ chmod +x hooks/post-receive

On local machine:

Now add a new remote to your local repo:

$ git remote add deploy git@myserver.com:mywebsite.git

Now deploy your code with a push command! (This assumes you want to push the master branch to this remote).

$ git push deploy +master:refs/heads/master

Now that the default head has been set you can push with the following, shorter command:

$ git push deploy

Strategy #3: Use other deployment software

Deploying with Git hooks is nice, and it’s met my needs so far. But there are more powerful tools available, like Capistrano and Fabric. I have not used any of these tools, but it looks like they allow you do the same one-line deployment commands (which also pull from your git repo), as well as providing extra tasks to adjust file permissions, clear cache directories, make database changes, etc. If you have a complex deployment process you want to automate I would suggest looking at one of these.

Comments