Pushing to production and Github in one command

I'm using git for all my workflow. I use either GitHub or BitBucket to store my code online. And for some tiny projects, I'm also using git directly to push in production.

Pushing to own remote

I have a few repositories that simply holds a bunch of html and css files, to display a very simple page. Whenever I push some changes to thoses repositories, I want to have the changes directly reflected online.

For this I created on my server a new repo, aptly named repo. In repo, I simply ran git init --bare to create a bare repository. Now, from my local repository I just update my local git repository to point the origin remote to this bare repository. Running git push pushed my changes to this repo.

Easy, I have my own repo on my own server to store my files.

Pushing to production

But that's only a bare repo, holding the list of changes but not exposing the working directory. For that, I cloned repo into another directory using git clone ./repo ./dist. This dist directory is actually served by nginx.

I added a hook to repo/hook/post-receive with the following code :

#!/bin/sh
unset GIT_DIR
cd /path/to/my/dist/directory
git pull

This will ran everytime the repo receives a new push. It will go to the dist folder and pull changes from repo (as repo is the default origin for dist as we cloned from it).

The part about unset GIT_DIR is needed so that the hook correctly run in a bare repo.

Now, everytime I push my code, the hook will be run and the dist repo will be updated. And as this directory is exposed through nginx, it will be directly available to all.

Pushing to multiple remotes

But that's not finished yet. I don't like having my code saved only in one place. I'd like to also have my sources available on GitHub. So I updated the post-receive hook by adding the following lines :

cd /path/to/my/repo/directory
git push

Of course, I also configured my origin remote to be GitHub, but you can make it any repo. This will automatically push the content to a secondary repo whenever the primary one receives new data.

Conclusion

With simple git hooks I managed to push my code to production and save the source in two different repository whenever I git push. Less commands to type, more time to code something else.

Tags : #git, #github

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