Git Deployment Tutorial SSH Key Setup

Context I needed to push to deploy my scraping app to a server. Using git seems to be the way to deploy web apps, so thought to use the same method.

Locations ¶

There are four locations to keep in mind. I’m deploying to an Ubuntu Server 16.04.

• A. Local Git and Working Repo: /Users/dhruvkar/projects/projectname/
• B. Remote Git Repo: /home/gitrepos/projectname.git/
• C. Remote Working Repo: /home/production/projectname/
• D. Remote Github Repo: https://github.com/dhruvkar/projectname

Location A is self-explanatory. It contains all the working code and is a git repository on your laptop.

Location B is a bare git repository. It only contains the git metadata references, not the working code on a remote server (Ubuntu 16.04 in this case).

Location C is where the working code goes. In this case, it’s on the same server as Location B.

Location D is an optional, but recommended, place to store all changes to your code.

Location A ¶

On this machine, you’ll make your project space, and add the remote repos, C and D.

$ mkdir /Users/dhruvkar/projects/mysuperproject
$ cd /Users/dhruvkar/projects/mysuperproject
$ git init
$ git remote add live ssh://dhruv@<ipaddress_of_server>/home/gitrepos/mysuperproject.git    #add private server as remote (Location C)
$ git remote add origin https://github.com/dhruvkar/mysuperproject.git                      #add github as remote (Location D)

Note that you’ll have to setup ssh keys with each of the remotes.

Location B ¶

$ ssh remoteserver                              #login to your remote private server
$ mkdir -p /home/gitrepos/mysuperproject.git    #create bare git repo
$ cd /home/gitrepos/mysuperproject.git          
$ git init --bare                               #initialize git

This will create a bunch of directory including a hooks directory. In this directory we’ll create a post-receive hook that’ll handle receiving a push from our local repo. While in the bare git repo do, vim hooks/post-receive. The contents of the hook are as follows:

#!/bin/sh
git --work-tree=/home/production/mysuperproject --git-dir=/home/gitrepos/mysuperproject.git checkout -f

Make this file executable: chmod +x hooks/post-receive

The work-tree is Location C, while the git-dir is Location B.

Location C ¶

On the same machine as Location B: $ mkdir -p /home/production/mysuperproject/

The post-receive hook we created above will receive a git push to Location B (from Location A) and then pull all the working code into Location C.

Location D ¶

This is the Github repo. If you’ve setup the SSH keys correctly and added this repo as a remote in Location A, you should be able to push to it from the your local repo.

Conclusion ¶

Now the workflow looks like this:

# Do this at Location A

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "first commit"
$ git push -u origin master         #push to Github
$ git push live master              #push to remote private server

You should now see your local repo reflected in Locations C and D.