Deploying and maintaining a website using git

I’ve kind of used git to deploy/ manage php/ static websites for a while now, but in a very luddite way – basically sshing into the webserver, cloning a repo into my site root directory, then hiding the .git folder in the Apache config.

After recently starting a new job and inheriting some web sites and web apps and starting to take the whole “devops” thing more seriously, I was pleased to see a better technique in place than the one i’ve been using.

The basic premise is this – a repo is set up on the web server as a remote outside of the web root, but configured so that the checkout working directory is another directory. The advantage of this is that there is no need to ssh into the webserver to update the code, as a post-update hook can be used to checkout the updated files.

In addition to this, we usually use tools such as gulp to process scss and minify and js, so the post-update hook can also be used to process these on the server after checkout.

Going into more detail, here is the config of the remote git repo on the webserver, this could be somewhere like /var/sites/mysite_git

[core]
repositoryformatversion = 0
filemode = true
bare = false
logallrefupdates = true
worktree = /var/sites/mysite
[receive]
denycurrentbranch = ignore

and in hooks/post-update on the remote, something like:-

git checkout -f
cd /var/sites/mysite
gulp build