Push-to-Deploy

I recently made a cool discovery about Git that changed the way I can manage my projects: push-to-deploy. Up until now, I mostly saw Git as just a way to synchronize my local projects with GitHub or GitLab (basically version control and collaboration). My usual routine was to initialize a repository on my local machine, link it to a remote, and start pushing changes. That was the extent of what Git meant to me.

But then someone shared a great tip with me: you can actually use Git to connect two local folders, not just your project and a remote like GitHub. That means for example that you can set up a direct link between your local project and a folder on your web server, effectively making push-to-deploy possible without needing any third-party services like hosting platforms.

I started using this approach to link my local development folders directly to the folder where my website is hosted. Now, when I make changes in my local project, I can simply push those changes, and they are directly deployed to my website. It's a clean and time-saving workflow that lets me skip the whole SSH process entirely.

The setup is also quite straightforward. You first need to access your website folder, and do the following:

     
$ git init --bare name.git
$ cd name.git/hooks
$ touch post-receive
$ chmod u+x post-receive
    

and write in the post-receive file the following:

    
#!/bin/bash

TARGET="../"
GIT_WORK_TREE="../"
BRANCH="master"

while read oldrev newrev ref
do
    # only checking out the master (or whatever branch you would like to deploy)
    if [ "$ref" = "refs/heads/$BRANCH" ];
    then
        echo "Ref $ref received. Deploying ${BRANCH} branch to production..."
        git --work-tree=$TARGET checkout -f $BRANCH
        git log --pretty="%h %ad (%cr)%x09 %an: %s" --date=short > ../git_commit_log.txt
    else
        echo "Ref $ref received. Doing nothing: only the ${BRANCH} branch may be deployed on this server."
    fi
done
    

Your remote is therefore all set. You need now to go to your local repository, initialize a .git, and add a remote as the following:

     
$ git init
$ git remote add yourremotename yourlinktothewebrepository
    

And voilà! It allows direct communication between two directories, automating the deployment process with each git push.

I've got to thank the person who first introduced me to this method, it's made my workflow so much smoother, and credit noelboss for originally coming up with this method.