Deploy a website remotely using Git

This a step by step tutorial, teaching you how to leverage Git to deploy your website to your remote server. It will guide you through each and every step. Familiarity with Git and the Linux Shell are a plus, but not mandatory.

1. Login to server

Open your terminal and login to your server using the following command:

ssh your_user@server_ip_address

You should:

  • replace your_\user with the actual username. By default, the username is the same as the host machine, unless you specify a different agent.
  • replace server_\ip_\address with the actual IP address of your server.

This command will prompt you to insert your password. Once you do, you are logged in.

2. Install git on server

To install Git on the server run the following commands

#1
apt-get update

#2
apt-get install git

  1. This updates the package lists for upgrades for packages that need upgrading, as well as new packages that have just come to the repositories. More information about apt-get can be found here.

  2. This will install Git.

If you run into permission problems, good old sudo + password should solve the problem.

3. Create a folder for the code

The source code to your website needs to be put somewhere. By convention, code goes inside the /var/www directory.

#1
cd /var/www

#2
mkdir website_name

  1. Navigates to the correct folder.

  2. Creates the folder where the code will go. Replace website_\name with the name of your website.

Now, the full path to where you will put your source code is /var/www/website_\folder/ This path will come in handy when setting up the Git repository.

4. Initialise a Git repository on your server

#1
mkdir -p /var/repo/website_name.git

#2
cd /var/repo/website_name.git

#3
git init --bare

  1. Creates a folder called website_\name.git inside of /var/repo. Inside of that we will host our Git repo.

  2. Navigate to that created folder using.

  3. Creates a new bare Git repository.

5. Create a hook

A Hook is a program you can place in a hooks directory to trigger actions at certain points in git’s execution.

There are several types of hooks. Each is invoked at a different stage. We are interested in the post-receive hook which is invoked after the repository receives new code.

From the website_name.git folder run the following commands:

#1
cd hooks

#2
touch post-receive

#3
nano post-receive
  1. Navigates to the hooks folder.
  2. Creates a post-receive hook.
  3. Opens the recently created post-receive hook with the nano editor.

Inside of the editor, copy the following code:

#1
#!/bin/sh

#2
git --work-tree=path_to_website_folder --git-dir=path_to_git_directory checkout -f name_of_branch
  1. A shebang, and tells the parent shell which interpreter should be used to execute the script.
  2. Runs git checkout -f name_of_branch where the worktree value is the path to the folder we created in point 3, and the --git-dir value is the path the bare git directory we created. The name_of_branch value is optional and when not explicitly mentioned, defaults to master.

Saving the modifications, and quit the editor.

NB: We can add other commands, like restarting the server.

6. Make the bash executable

One last step is needed, and that is to make the post-receive script we just created executable. To do so run the following command: chmod +x post-receive

You can now logout from the server by running logout.

7. Push local code to the server

Navigate to the folder where your code lives on your local machine, and make sure it is a git repository. If it's not already, just run git init.

To push the code to the remote server, run:

git remote add name_of_repository ssh://your_user@server_ip_address/path_to_git_directory
  • name_of_repository can be anything you want.
  • path_to_git_directory is the path to where we created our .git folder on our server. In this case it's /var/repo/website_name.git

Finally, push the code to the remote repository using: git push name_of_repository name_of_branch