I have a git repo where a group of developers and I are collaborating on project code. occasionally, we'd like to copy the git repo to a VPS (setup as Linux server) that has an external IP address (w.x.y.z).
I can go into an SFTP client and navigate up the folder hierarchy to the server root and then navigate down to /var/www/ (server web root) to drop my files in but I'd like to deploy to the server through the command line instead.
My goal is to configure the Linux server as a remote git directory but don't know how to go about navigating up the file hierarchy to have git recognize that the remote branch repo needs to go into /var/www/.
Brief search has uncovered git remote add origin username#w.x.y.z then use git push origin.
It seems that connecting this way to w.x.y.z will land me at the home folder of 'username', not the root web directory (/var/www/) when accessed via the browser.
Does anyone have insight into how I should go about setting up a remote directory for deploying a git repo to a "production" server?
You appear to be doing this a rather non-obvious way. I think what you want to do is copy the git repo to somewhere else (the vps server). The standard way to achieve this is git clone.
In your /var/www/ directory or an appropriate subdirectory thereof, do:
git clone [URL-FROM-GITHUB]
That will clone the git repository to your VPS. You can then update it with
git pull
could script this with
ssh my.vps.server 'cd /var/www/whatever && git pull'
However, normally you don't want the entire project in '/var/www/...' because that would also put stuff you did not mean to deploy there, e.g. the .git directory. Hence perhaps better to clone the repo within your home directory, and make a small script to rsync the appropriate /var/www/ directory against your repo, using --exclude to remove files you don't want, or just rsync-ing a subdirectory of the repo.
Related
I have a big problem and I can't understand this topic. I have a server with a website. I created a repository there with git init. Than I made a git add * to add all files from my server to the repository. Than I made a commit to commit all files to the repository.
Than I cloned it with git clone ssh://username#mysite.com/wordpress/.git to my local client.
All worked fine and I got a copy from my project. No I changed something on my local version and made a commit with a push. I looked in FileZilla but the content in the file don't changed. In the other direction when I changed something on the sever and pulled it to the local copy I saw the changes. Do you know why the changes which I made on the local copy are not visible on my sever?
Thank you for your help!
You need to push changes to a central repository that both your local machine and server can pull from (or add them as remotes for each other). A service such as GitHub works nicely for this. Here are instructions for a full workflow that works well for this. Updated instructions can be found in this gist. This workflow uses hooks to do the heavy lifting so that updates to your server are automated.
Using Git to Manage a Live Web Site
Overview
As a freelancer, I build a lot of web sites. That's a lot of code changes to track. Thankfully, a Git-enabled workflow with proper branching makes short work of project tracking. I can easily see development features in branches as well as a snapshot of the sites' production code. A nice addition to that workflow is that ability to use Git to push updates to any of the various sites I work on while committing changes.
You'll need to have Git installed on your development machines as well as on the server or servers where you wish to host your website. This process can even be adapted to work with multiple servers such as mirrors behind a load balancer.
Setting up Passwordless SSH Access
The process for updating a live web server relies on the use of post hooks within the Git environment. Since this is fully automated, there is no opportunity to enter login credentials while establishing the SSH connection to the remote server. To work around this, we are going to set up passwordless SSH access. To begin, you will need to SSH into your server.
ssh user#hostname
Next, you'll need to make sure you have a ~/.ssh in your user's home directory. If not, go ahead and create one now.
mkdir ~/.ssh
On Mac and Linux, you can harness the power of terminal to do both in one go.
if [ ! -d ~/.ssh ]; then mkdir ~/.ssh; fi
Next you'll need to generate a public SSH key if you don't already have one. List the files in your ~/.ssh directory to check.
ls -al ~/.ssh
The file you're looking for is usually named similarly to id_rsa.pub. If you're not sure, you can generate a new one. The command below will create an SSH key using the provided email as a label.
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "your_email#example.com"
You'll probably want to keep all of the default settings. This will should create a file named id_rsa in the ~/.ssh directory created earlier.
When prompted, be sure to provide a secure SSH passphrase.
If you had to create an SSH key, you'll need to configure the ssh-agent program to use it.
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa
If you know what you are doing, you can use an existing SSH key in your ~/.ssh directory by providing the private key file to ssh-agent.
If you're still not sure what's going on, you should two files in your ~/.ssh directory that correspond to the private and public key files. Typically, the public key will be a file by the same name with a .pub extension added. An example would be a private key file named id_rsa and a public key file named id_rsa.pub.
Once you have generated an SSH key on your local machine, it's time to put the matching shared key file on the server.
ssh user#hostname 'cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys' < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
This will add your public key to the authorized keys on the remote server. This process can be repeated from each development machine to add as many authorized keys as necessary to the server. You'll know you did it correctly when you close your connection and reconnect without being prompted for a password.
Configuring the Remote Server Repository
The machine you intend to use as a live production server needs to have a Git repository that can write to an appropriate web-accessible directory. The Git metadata (the .git directory) does not need to be in a web-accessible location. Instead, it can be anywhere that is user-writeable by your SSH user.
Setting up a Bare Repository
In order to push files to your web server, you'll need to have a copy of your repository on your web server. You'll want to start by creating a bare repository to house your web site. The repository should be set up somewhere outside of your web root. We'll instruct Git where to put the actual files later. Once you decide on location for your repository, the following commands will create the bare repository.
mkdir mywebsite.git
cd mywebsite.git
git init --bare
A bare repository contains all of the Git metadata without any HEAD. Essentially, this means that your repository has a .git directory, but does not have any working files checked out. The next step is to create a Git hook that will check out those files any time you instruct it to.
If you wish to run git commands from the detached work tree, you'll need to set the environmental variable GIT_DIR to the path of mywebsite.git before running any commands.
Add a Post-Receive Hook
Create a file named post-receive in the hooks directory of your repository with the following contents.
#!/bin/sh
GIT_WORK_TREE=/path/to/webroot/of/mywebsite git checkout -f
Once you create your hook, go ahead and mark it as executable.
chmod +x hooks/post-receive
GIT_WORK_TREE allows you to instruct Git where the working directory should be for a repository. This allows you to keep the repository outside of the web root with a detached work tree in a web accessible location. Make sure the path you specify exists, Git will not create it for you.
Configuring the Local Development Machine
The local development machine will house the web site repository. Relevant files will be copied to the live server whenever you choose to push those changes. This means you should keep a working copy of the repository on your development machine. You could also employ the use of any centralized repository including cloud-based ones such as GitHub or BitBucket. Your workflow is entirely up to you. Since all changes are pushed from the local repository, this process is not affected by how you choose to handle your project.
Setting up the Working Repository
On your development machine, you should have a working Git repository. If not, you can create on in an existing project directory with the following commands.
git init
git add -A
git commit -m "Initial Commit"
Add a Remote Repository Pointing to the Web Server
Once you have a working repository, you'll need to add a remote pointing to the one you set up on your server.
git remote add live ssh://server1.example.com/home/user/mywebsite.git
Make sure the hostname and path you provide point to the server and repository you set up previously. Finally, it's time to push your current website to the live server for the first time.
git push live +master:refs/head/main
This command instructs Git to push the current main branch to the live remote. (There's no need to send any other branches.) In the future, the server will only check out from the main branch so you won't need to specify that explicitly every time.
Build Something Beautiful
Everything is ready to go. It's time to let the creative juices flow! Your workflow doesn't need to change at all. Whenever you are ready, pushing changes to the live web server is as simple as running the following command.
git push live
Setting receive.denycurrentbranch to "ignore" on the server eliminates a warning issued by recent versions of Git when you push an update to a checked-out branch on the server.
Additional Tips
Here are a few more tips and tricks that you may find useful when employing this style of workflow.
Pushing Changes to Multiple Servers
You may find the need to push to multiple servers. Perhaps you have multiple testing servers or your live site is mirrored across multiple servers behind a load balancer. In any case, pushing to multiple servers is as easy as adding more urls to the [remote "live"] section in .git/config.
[remote "live"]
url = ssh://server1.example.com/home/user/mywebsite.git
url = ssh://server2.example.com/home/user/mywebsite.git
Now issuing the command git push live will update all of the urls you've added at one time. Simple!
Ignoring Local Changes to Tracked Files
From time to time you'll find there are files you want to track in your repository but don't wish to have changed every time you update your website. A good example would be configuration files in your web site that have settings specific to the server the site is on. Pushing updates to your site would ordinarily overwrite these files with whatever version of the file lives on your development machine. Preventing this is easy. SSH into the remote server and navigate into the Git repository. Enter the following command, listing each file you wish to ignore.
git update-index --assume-unchanged <file...>
This instructs Git to ignore any changes to the specified files with any future checkouts. You can reverse this effect on one or more files any time you deem necessary.
git update-index --no-assume-unchanged <file...>
If you want to see a list of ignored files, that's easy too.
git ls-files -v | grep ^[a-z]
References
Deploy Your Website Changes Using Git
A simple Git deployment strategy for static sites
Using Git to manage a website
Ignoring Local Changes to Tracked Files in Git
pushing the code merely updates the remote repository's references.
It doesn't change the checked out working copy.
Consider that you could add a colleague's repository as a remote. If you pushed and the behaviour was that it would auto-checkout that new code, that would affect what they're working on.
It sounds like what you really want is a continuous integration tool, be it something full featured or merely an rsync triggered from a git hook.
you should only ever push to a bare repository (unless you know exactly what you are doing; and even then, you should only ever push to a bare repository).
you shouldn't clone a working copy's .git/ directory.
I previously kept a bare git repository on a Linux server and a working copy in my local Windows laptop for development (syncing to the server using TortoiseGit over ssh). The server version was deleted/lost so I want to recreate the repo on the server using the latest commit from the local working copy on the Windows machine.
What is the best way to create this new remote bare repo copy on the remote Linux server from the Windows working copy?
You can re-create the linux server repo using
mkdir -p myrepo.git
cd myrepo.git
git init --bare
On the local copy, assuming the remote URL is the same, do
git push origin <branch refspec>
for example
git push origin master
Note: If the remote URL has changed you can use
git remote set-url origin <new-url>
Just create the repo on the server, then add the repo to your local one as remote if it is not the same location as before and push to it.
Follow these steps:
Create a bare repository on remote.
I guess the answer provided by ad22 is good enough for you:
mkdir -p myrepo.git
cd myrepo.git
git init --bare
Otherwise, you need to find out how to create a bare repository on server.
Copy or Memo the URL of that just created bare repository.
(Of cause, you need to have the right for accessing the URL.)
Add a new remote for your local repository.
Since you already have a local repository,
Right click in that repository, Click TortoiseGit -> Settings,
Give the remote a shortname and URL you copied
Add it and apply the setting.
See:
Push to remote by right clicking in local repository and click Push item.
In Push dialog,
Select the remote you just added.
Check the Push all branches checkbox if all branches can be public, otherwise you need push each branch one by one.
Check the Include Tags checkbox if you want to push all tags.
Suppose that's all. ^__^
On your Windows machine:
git clone --bare /path/to/local-working-copy-of-the-repo
The above command will create local-working-copy-of-the-repo.git folder.
Now copy the folder(bare repository) on to the Linux server.
Hope this helps.
I have followed this tutorial here and made it to this line.
git remote add production demo#server_domain_or_IP:root
I have a bare repo setup on my remote server and I have verified the username and domain are correct because I use the same user name and domain ( I actually use the IP address ) to ssh into the account.
I have a simple directory name root in the top level directory.
Yet I get this error.
fatal: not a git repository ...
What I tried
I tried changing the folder name to root.git but this did nothing as I expected yet could not think of what else to try.
Research
Receiving "fatal: Not a git repository" when attempting to remote add a Git repo
I don't think this answer is correct, because a bare repo does not have a .git directory. You should not need a .git directory for a folder to be a repo ( It could be a bare repo ).
You must be in a git working directory to run this command. It is the second answer down in the research link you produced.
I am not sure but maybe try
/root
instead of
root
because
without the / it will search root in /home/demo/root.
SOLUTION BELOW - How to use git to push to cpanel server
I finally got somewhere with setting up Git between my localhost (WAMP setup on Windows 8.1) and my Linux server (CentOS 6.6 x64 with cPanel 11.46.2).
Locally I created a bare clone: git clone --bare my_project my_project.git
NOTE: my_project is an example name, not the real name, and from this doc here: http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Getting-Git-on-a-Server
I copied the my_project.git folder to my server's root directory /home/myuser/public_html/
so now in the root directory I have:
cgi-bin
my_project.git
This is one area I am unsure of. Do I have to do an init (using putty) on my server in the public_html directory? I read something about a bare init? I just want to push (from my PC) the website I already have under Git control, to the server. When I make a change to 1 file, push that change to the server so it's updated live with a push. The website is DONE and ready to be live. I have already manually moved back and forth for live testing on the server. My last step is to get the Git setup correctly, so any further changes I can just push them to the server without the need of FTP.
I added a remote origin: git remote add origin ssh://myuser#thedomain.com/home/myuser/public_html/my_project.git
I tried to push to it, and got "Permission denied (publickey)". I already had an id_rsa and id_rsa.pub key locally on my PC, so I copied them and renamed them to id_rsa.myname id_rsa.myname.pub (where myname is my first name). I then copied them to the .ssh folder through FTP (FTP as cpanel user, and it's the directory your dumped into, above public_html), same as /home/myuser/.ssh/ directory.
Once they where there, I added them to 'authorized_keys' using Putty logged in as the cpanel user (my private ppk) by doing:
cd .ssh
cat id_rsa.myname >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
cat id_rsa.myname.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
After doing that, a push appeared to work. Because I was having a key/auth issue, I used Git Gui version, which was setup and worked fine locally. I added the origins through Git Bash though. When I did "Remote > Push" in the Gui version, I got:
Pushing to ssh://theregistrybank#theregistrybank.com/home/theregistrybank/public_html/yiire gistrybank.git
stdin: is not a tty
To ssh://myuser#thedomain.com/home/myuser/public_html/my_project.git
44ae034..0388a05 master -> master
updating local tracking ref 'refs/remotes/origin/master'
Before doing the push, the only file modified (diff from the bare clone I transferred to the server) was my .gitignore file. I added 2 more exclusions to it, and committed it locally. So I was trying to push the change in that file. After I did the push, it said "success" in green and appeared to work. However, when I check the file in FileZilla, the .gitignore file is not the updated one that I just committed locally.
I think I am close, but missed a step somewhere. I tried to be as descriptive as possible.
And putting the source on GitHub is not an option as the client does not want the source public, and does not want to pay for the private repos. I should be able to push from my local setup to the cPanel server so I don't have to transfer thousands of files every time. I actually transfer a zip file, and unzip on the server lol.
Server Info
cPanel 11.46.2 build 0
CentOS 6.6 x86_64 kvm build01
Yes, Git is setup on the server, and working, and git --version reports:git version 1.7.1
Git on my PC: git version 1.9.4.msysgit.2
Thank you in advance.
SOLUTION
Thanks to #VonC I was able to get this to work :)
You need somewhere for your git repo to sit. I created a 'git-repos' folder in '/home/cpaneluser/git-repos' to house my repos for this cpanel user.
First step is to create a bare repo: http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Getting-Git-on-a-Server - I only followed the first step, basically created the bare repo 'my-project.git'
Before putting it on your server, rename 'my-project.git/hooks/post-receive.sample' to just 'post-receive' so it will be ran. Edit it with your editor, and add the line that #VonC gave us in his chosen answer:
#!/bin/sh
umask 0022
GIT_WORK_TREE=/home/cpaneluser/public_html GIT_DIR=/home/cpaneluser/git-repos/my-project.git git checkout -f
Note: I am using cpanel, so your path's may be different, and your umask could be different. 0022 is for 0644 file permissions. Without the umask, I was getting 500 Internal Server Errors, because the files were created with 0664 permissions instead.
Using FTP or whatever you like, copy the 'my-project.git' bare repo to your server to '/home/cpaneluser/git-repos'. Then go into 'my-project.git/hooks' and change the permissions of post-receive to have execute permissions. For me, 0744 worked fine. This was the magic sauce :)
Locally, add your remote (must be in your git project): git remote set-url origin ssh://cpaneluser#yourdomain.com/home/cpaneluser/git-repos/my-project.git
Now if you try to push now, it won't put the files in 'public_html' because the git tree (terminology?) matches and is up to date. If they are up to date, it seems to skip over executing your 'post-receive' hook. That means your bash script never ran, and it never checked out the files to your working tree.
We need to manually run the 'post-receive' bash script to create all the files of our project in the 'public_html' directory.
cd to '/home/cpaneluser/git-repos/my-project.git/hooks'
Run: ./post-receive
Boom, all your files are in 'public_html'. Now you can work locally, then push to your cpanel server as expected :)
I had a similar problem with my cPanel account, git was set up but for some reason I couldn't push to it. After a lot of head-banging I realized that the root of the problem is like you pointed out that although git is set up, the repo is empty so there's nothing for it to track.
This happens when you set up an empty repo in cPanel and then try pushing a local repo that you've already created, as opposed to cloning it first from github or your local repo (which is what happened to me because for some reason I couldn't access my github from the cPanel git interface even though I had set up a SSH key)
The simple solution that I found is to manually clone the repo using the terminal in your cPanel account
On your cPanel dashboard, under the "advanced" section, you'll find the terminal. You'll get a warning saying that you could mess up your server if you don't know what you're doing, click ok and you're in.
Now you just have to clone your repo the same way you would if you're cloning onto a local machine.
Navigate to where git was set up in your cPanel
cd repositories/<nameOfYourRepo>
And run the clone command
git clone <URLofYourGithubReop>
You'll be asked for your github username and password if it's a private repository
And that's it, you're good to go
What you have copied (my_project.git) is a bare repo, meaning one without a working tree (the actual checked out files).
Read for instance "Git workflow - Setting up a build process".
That means pushing to if won't change anything in /home/myuser/public_html/
The missing piece is a post-receive hook (in /home/myuser/public_html/my_project.git/hooks/post-receive, make sure it is executable: chmod +x), in order to checkout the repo in /home/myuser/public_html/.
#!/bin/sh
GIT_WORK_TREE=/home/myuser/public_html GIT_DIR=/home/myuser/public_html/my_project.git git checkout -f
I cannot find my project files on the server gitolite is running.
Basically, I built a git server using gitolite on a CentOS 6.2, and I created a new repository,I can successfully clone, pull, commit and push files to this new project, but when I logged in this server, trying to find my project files on it, I could not find them. the repository is in /home/mygituser/repositories/myproject.git/ , but none of my pushed files can be found any in there.
Is gitolite keeping the actual project contents somewhere else or is there a way to config and seperate project contents and its repository?
This is driving me crazy, any help will be highly appreciated.
Gitolite operates with bare repositories.
A bare repo has no working tree, meaning no files.
That is why, by the way, your repo root directory ends with .git: it is a naming convention to reference bare repos.
See "Git push only for bare repositories?" for more.
Your repos are managed by default on:
~git/repositories/myrepo1.git
~git/repositories/myrepo2.git
Generally, you don't need to look to the content of a repo while being on the server: you simply clone it on a client and look it there. (the clone won't be a bare repo by default)
You could clone it on the server, if you have a proper ~git/.ssh/id_rsa(.pub) key declared as a user in the gitolite.conf file.
It is what I do, as a test, after installing/updating gitolite on my server.
That works because of my local ssh config file:
Host gitolitesrv
Hostname localhost
User #USERNAME#
Port #PORT_SSHD#
IdentityFile #H#/.ssh/gitoliteadm
So I have a ~git/.ssh/gitolite(.pub) private and public key dedicated to gitolite admin, which I can use locally on the server to clone gitolite repo if I want.
That is because I use that same key to setup gitolite:
GITOLITE_HTTP_HOME= gitolite setup -pk "${H}/.ssh/gitoliteadm.pub"
If you have a similar setup, you can then clone any repo on the server:
git clone gitolitesrv:gitolite-admin "${gtl}/ga"