How to do version control via ftp? - linux

I have a web dev. client using a shared host that doesn't allow shell access, and thus no access to SVN, Git, etc. I've tried to convince him to move to one of the many cheap options that allow it, but he won't do it. If I use version control on my staging server, are there any tools that will allow me to replicate the changes to production via ftp? Locally I have both mac & windows, the staging server is linux, so something that works on any of those platforms....

Using your Linux staging server you could keep a separate checked out copy that you use specifically for that host and then use a utility to mirror that directory with the host server.
LFTP is useful for this kind of thing. Its available for most Linux distributions and includes a 'mirror' function:
Mirror specified source directory to
local target directory. If target
directory ends with a slash, the source base name is appended to
target
directory name. Source and/or target can be URLs pointing to
directories.

Some kind of ftp mirror software is what you need. Not tested it but a quick search gave me this Java application. You could run that over your up-to-date checked out repository.

Good thing for keeping SVN repo and FTP copy in sync is svn2web. May I suggest creating separate branch for production copy and do merges to that branch for uploading to production server.

You probably need to write a batch file that is able to
Export the SVN repository
Upload the exported files to your Linux server via FTP

Short of finding / implementing some FUSE based CoW file system that supports immutable versions .. I'd just find another (more developer friendly) host. As far as I know, no FTP server supports this natively, nor can I think of any elegant means of putting it in place with script hackery.
I could be wrong.

This question (and answer) really helped me just now as I implemented version control via gitolite on a separate server and lftp.
Here’s what I did:
Set up gitolite on my ubuntu staging server
created base repo (i.e. foo.git) on staging server
cloned foo.git into working directory on staging server
cloned foo.git into working directory on local development machine
Developed locally
Pushed changes to foo.git repo on staging server
On staging server, logged into working directory, and pulled in changes from foo.git
lftp-ed into shared host (like you mention above)
Once in shared host, ran:
mirror -R --only-newer --delete --parallel=10 /source/directory/ /target/directory
Notes on the mirror command options:
-R - this pushes the source/directory to the target/directory. (mirror pulls in from target to source without this, think reverse)
—only-newer - without this option, even if you only changed one file, the mirror command will send all the files in the source directory over to the target directory. with this option only the changed (newer) files are transferred over the wire.
—delete - deletes files that are no longer in the source directory but still in the target directory. one of my pushes involved deleting expired assets. without this option, the same files would have stayed put on my shared host after executing the mirror command.
—parallel=10 - transfers 10 files at once (instead of 1 by default). this made the process much faster
While this is what worked for me, I’m sure there are ways to improve on this. I was grateful for this question and thought i’d share my experience.

Rsync will do this over an FTP connection. You probably already have it installed if you’re on a Unix-like system.

Related

how to launch eclipse on linux [duplicate]

I have the following boxes:
a) A Windows box with Eclipse CDT,
b) A Linux box, accessible for me only via SSH.
Both the compiler and the hardware required to build and run my project is only on machine B.
I'd like to work "transparently" from a Windows box on that project using Eclipse CDT and be able to build, run and debug the project remotely from within the IDE.
How do I set up that:
The building will work? Any simpler solutions than writing a local makefile which would rsync the project and then call a remote makefile to initiate the actual build? Does Eclipse managed build have a feature for that?
The debugging will work?
Preferably - the Eclipse CDT code indexing will work? Do I have to copy all required header files from machine B to machine A and add them to include path manually?
Try the Remote System Explorer (RSE). It's a set of plug-ins to do exactly what you want.
RSE may already be included in your current Eclipse installation. To check in Eclipse Indigo go to Window > Open Perspective > Other... and choose Remote System Explorer from the Open Perspective dialog to open the RSE perspective.
To create an SSH remote project from the RSE perspective in Eclipse:
Define a new connection and choose SSH Only from the Select Remote System Type screen in the New Connection dialog.
Enter the connection information then choose Finish.
Connect to the new host. (Assumes SSH keys are already setup.)
Once connected, drill down into the host's Sftp Files, choose a folder and select Create Remote Project from the item's context menu. (Wait as the remote project is created.)
If done correctly, there should now be a new remote project accessible from the Project Explorer and other perspectives within eclipse. With the SSH connection set-up correctly passwords can be made an optional part of the normal SSH authentication process. A remote project with Eclipse via SSH is now created.
The very simplest way would be to run Eclipse CDT on the Linux Box and use either X11-Forwarding or remote desktop software such as VNC.
This, of course, is only possible when you Eclipse is present on the Linux box and your network connection to the box is sufficiently fast.
The advantage is that, due to everything being local, you won't have synchronization issues, and you don't get any awkward cross-platform issues.
If you have no eclipse on the box, you could thinking of sharing your linux working directory via SMB (or SSHFS) and access it from your windows machine, but that would require quite some setup.
Both would be better than having two copies, especially when it's cross-platform.
I'm in the same spot myself (or was), FWIW I ended up checking out to a samba share on the Linux host and editing that share locally on the Windows machine with notepad++, then I compiled on the Linux box via PuTTY. (We weren't allowed to update the ten y/o versions of the editors on the Linux host and it didn't have Java, so I gave up on X11 forwarding)
Now... I run modern Linux in a VM on my Windows host, add all the tools I want (e.g. CDT) to the VM and then I checkout and build in a chroot jail that closely resembles the RTE.
It's a clunky solution but I thought I'd throw it in to the mix.
My solution is similar to the SAMBA one except using sshfs. Mount my remote server with sshfs, open my makefile project on the remote machine. Go from there.
It seems I can run a GUI frontend to mercurial this way as well.
Building my remote code is as simple as: ssh address remote_make_command
I am looking for a decent way to debug though. Possibly via gdbserver?
I tried ssh -X but it was unbearably slow.
I also tried RSE, but it didn't even support building the project with a Makefile (I'm being told that this has changed since I posted my answer, but I haven't tried that out)
I read that NX is faster than X11 forwarding, but I couldn't get it to work.
Finally, I found out that my server supports X2Go (the link has install instructions if yours does not). Now I only had to:
download and unpack Eclipse on the server,
install X2Go on my local machine (sudo apt-get install x2goclient on Ubuntu),
configure the connection (host, auto-login with ssh key, choose to run Eclipse).
Everything is just as if I was working on a local machine, including building, debugging, and code indexing. And there are no noticeable lags.
I had the same problem 2 years ago and I solved it in the following way:
1) I build my projects with makefiles, not managed by eclipse
2) I use a SAMBA connection to edit the files inside Eclipse
3) Building the project:
Eclipse calles a "local" make with a makefile which opens a SSH connection
to the Linux Host. On the SSH command line you can give parameters which
are executed on the Linux host. I use for that parameter a makeit.sh shell script
which call the "real" make on the linux host.
The different targets for building you can give also by parameters from
the local makefile --> makeit.sh --> makefile on linux host.
The way I solved that one was:
For windows:
Export the 'workspace' directory from the Linux machine using samba.
Mount it locally in windows.
Run Eclipse, using the mounted 'workspace' directory as the eclipse workspace.
Import the project you want and work on it.
For Linux:
Mount the 'workspace' directory using sshfs
Run Eclipse.
Run Eclipse, using the mounted 'workspace' directory as the eclipse workspace.
Import the project you want and work on it.
In both cases you can either build and run through Eclipse, or build on the remote machine via ssh.
For this case you can use ptp eclipse https://eclipse.org/ptp/ for source browsing and building.
You can use this pluging to debug your application
http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/direct-remote-c-debugging
How to edit in Eclipse locally, but use a git-based script I wrote (sync_git_repo_from_pc1_to_pc2.sh) to synchronize and build remotely
The script I wrote to do this is sync_git_repo_from_pc1_to_pc2.sh.
Readme: README_git-sync_repo_from_pc1_to_pc2.md
Update: see also this alternative/competitor: GitSync:
How to use Sublime over SSH
https://github.com/jachin/GitSync
This answer currently only applies to using two Linux computers [or maybe works on Mac too?--untested on Mac] (syncing from one to the other) because I wrote this synchronization script in bash. It is simply a wrapper around git, however, so feel free to take it and convert it into a cross-platform Python solution or something if you wish
This doesn't directly answer the OP's question, but it is so close I guarantee it will answer many other peoples' question who land on this page (mine included, actually, as I came here first before writing my own solution), so I'm posting it here anyway.
I want to:
develop code using a powerful IDE like Eclipse on a light-weight Linux computer, then
build that code via ssh on a different, more powerful Linux computer (from the command-line, NOT from inside Eclipse)
Let's call the first computer where I write the code "PC1" (Personal Computer 1), and the 2nd computer where I build the code "PC2". I need a tool to easily synchronize from PC1 to PC2. I tried rsync, but it was insanely slow for large repos and took tons of bandwidth and data.
So, how do I do it? What workflow should I use? If you have this question too, here's the workflow that I decided upon. I wrote a bash script to automate the process by using git to automatically push changes from PC1 to PC2 via a remote repository, such as github. So far it works very well and I'm very pleased with it. It is far far far faster than rsync, more trustworthy in my opinion because each PC maintains a functional git repo, and uses far less bandwidth to do the whole sync, so it's easily doable over a cell phone hot spot without using tons of your data.
Setup:
Install the script on PC1 (this solution assumes ~/bin is in your $PATH):
git clone https://github.com/ElectricRCAircraftGuy/eRCaGuy_dotfiles.git
cd eRCaGuy_dotfiles/useful_scripts
mkdir -p ~/bin
ln -s "${PWD}/sync_git_repo_from_pc1_to_pc2.sh" ~/bin/sync_git_repo_from_pc1_to_pc2
cd ..
cp -i .sync_git_repo ~/.sync_git_repo
Now edit the "~/.sync_git_repo" file you just copied above, and update its parameters to fit your case. Here are the parameters it contains:
# The git repo root directory on PC2 where you are syncing your files TO; this dir must *already exist*
# and you must have *already `git clone`d* a copy of your git repo into it!
# - Do NOT use variables such as `$HOME`. Be explicit instead. This is because the variable expansion will
# happen on the local machine when what we need is the variable expansion from the remote machine. Being
# explicit instead just avoids this problem.
PC2_GIT_REPO_TARGET_DIR="/home/gabriel/dev/eRCaGuy_dotfiles" # explicitly type this out; don't use variables
PC2_SSH_USERNAME="my_username" # explicitly type this out; don't use variables
PC2_SSH_HOST="my_hostname" # explicitly type this out; don't use variables
Git clone your repo you want to sync on both PC1 and PC2.
Ensure your ssh keys are all set up to be able to push and pull to the remote repo from both PC1 and PC2. Here's some helpful links:
https://help.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/connecting-to-github-with-ssh
https://help.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/generating-a-new-ssh-key-and-adding-it-to-the-ssh-agent
Ensure your ssh keys are all set up to ssh from PC1 to PC2.
Now cd into any directory within the git repo on PC1, and run:
sync_git_repo_from_pc1_to_pc2
That's it! About 30 seconds later everything will be magically synced from PC1 to PC2, and it will be printing output the whole time to tell you what it's doing and where it's doing it on your disk and on which computer. It's safe too, because it doesn't overwrite or delete anything that is uncommitted. It backs it up first instead! Read more below for how that works.
Here's the process this script uses (ie: what it's actually doing)
From PC1: It checks to see if any uncommitted changes are on PC1. If so, it commits them to a temporary commit on the current branch. It then force pushes them to a remote SYNC branch. Then it uncommits its temporary commit it just did on the local branch, then it puts the local git repo back to exactly how it was by staging any files that were previously staged at the time you called the script. Next, it rsyncs a copy of the script over to PC2, and does an ssh call to tell PC2 to run the script with a special option to just do PC2 stuff.
Here's what PC2 does: it cds into the repo, and checks to see if any local uncommitted changes exist. If so, it creates a new backup branch forked off of the current branch (sample name: my_branch_SYNC_BAK_20200220-0028hrs-15sec <-- notice that's YYYYMMDD-HHMMhrs--SSsec), and commits any uncommitted changes to that branch with a commit message such as DO BACKUP OF ALL UNCOMMITTED CHANGES ON PC2 (TARGET PC/BUILD MACHINE). Now, it checks out the SYNC branch, pulling it from the remote repository if it is not already on the local machine. Then, it fetches the latest changes on the remote repository, and does a hard reset to force the local SYNC repository to match the remote SYNC repository. You might call this a "hard pull". It is safe, however, because we already backed up any uncommitted changes we had locally on PC2, so nothing is lost!
That's it! You now have produced a perfect copy from PC1 to PC2 without even having to ensure clean working directories, as the script handled all of the automatic committing and stuff for you! It is fast and works very well on huge repositories. Now you have an easy mechanism to use any IDE of your choice on one machine while building or testing on another machine, easily, over a wifi hot spot from your cell phone if needed, even if the repository is dozens of gigabytes and you are time and resource-constrained.
Resources:
The whole project: https://github.com/ElectricRCAircraftGuy/eRCaGuy_dotfiles
See tons more links and references in the source code itself within this project.
How to do a "hard pull", as I call it: How do I force "git pull" to overwrite local files?
Related:
git repository sync between computers, when moving around?

TortoiseGit - copy via sftp on pull

Intro:
I have 2 folders which are on the same GIT repository, one is on a very slow Samba network drive, and one locally. using GIT on samba is extremely slow, but the Samba is my server, which is actually vmplayer running ubuntu server on a windows machine.
My question is:
is it possible to automatically copy files from the local directory, after a pull has been done, to the other samba folder. I do this in Sublime text editor (via addon), but it copies only when I save a file. I want that functionality also on GIT. (i'm mainly using TortoiseGit)
thanks.
Yes, there are git hooks. Have a look at
git help hooks
you can define what's automatically to be done after a pull. However, your system sounds insane and you should think about not doing that with the slow share. Also, I don't understand why an Ubuntu on a VMWare player would be really slow, unless you royally messed up configuration (not to mention I really don't understand why you wouldn't just let your windows do the shares, instead of letting a linux VM do that -- and I don't really like windows at all).

Using Git with a Samba shared folder

I am new to Git, and trying to determine how to best implement it.
I have the following four machines:
Linux server running GitLabs which stores my main repository.
Linux production server running Apache, etc. I am not currently concerned about this part.
Linux development server running Apache, etc. It also runs Samba and maps /var/www to Windows. It is located in my home and is on a LAN.
Windows 7 PC running a PHP IDE (happens to be PhpED). It is located in my home and is on the same LAN as the Linux development server. It directly edits the files in the Samba
folder on the Linux development server, as well as uses this folder for debugging, and does not have code directly on it. The IDE has some basic Git functionality via TortoiseGit, however, I don't yet know how strong it is.
I am currently not concerned about sharing files, but only version control.
I've read that Git is all about being local. Giving my configuration, does that mean Git is run on the Windows PC even though my working directory is not located on it? Or is it handled just using Linux between /var/www/ and the GitLab repository? How do you envision I implement Git under this configuration?
Thank you
Git works on files. With the way you describe it, you will be running git on your windows pc - the fact the files are actually being accessed via the network rather than directly is something git probably won't even be aware of. As long as that is the only machine accessing that share, it should be fine.
But it's not really how you should use git. It has it's own mechanism for pushing/pulling changes between machines; so unless you are running an interesting driveless setup, you should probably consider storing the working directory on the machine that it is being edited on. Especially if there is a chance the files could be accessed from the linux machine as well (mixing version control accesses to the same working directory between multiple machines is always a bad idea, let alone between multiple OSes.

Using git to just monitor changes on a webserver

I am tasked with monitoring the changes made to the source files of a website. I am not developing the website, just watching it. I am a firm believer in using version control, and am a fan of git, but the developer who is actually maintaining the site is not, and I have decided it is better to let him continue to work however he wants (don't ask). I do not want to have to give him any instructions whatsoever (except possibly telling him that I am adding files or directories that he can ignore).
I consider myself an intermediate-level user of git, so I want to run this by an expert or two.
I am thinking I can install git on the (Linux) server, and then ask for status, and do commits, via SSH. Will this work without jeopardizing the normal operation of the web server?
Yes, using Git on a server should not interfere with the normal operation of the server (as mentioned in the comments, doing this on a production server is dodgy but I'll leave that to one side.)
Note that using Git normally will create a .git directory at the root of whatever you're tracking. If that is your web server root directory, you might want to consider whether this is a risk as far as external access to the contents of the .git directory (depending on your server setup, this may or may not be a concern).
If you want to create the .git directory somewhere else outside your working tree, see the GIT_DIR environment variable.

Deploy Mercurial Changes to Website Hosting Account

I want to move only the website files changed since the published revision to a hosting account using SSH or FTP. The hosting account is Linux based but does have have any version control installed, so I can't simply do an update there, and the solution must run on the local development machines.
I'm essentially trying to do what http://www.deployhq.com/ does, but for free. I want to publish changes without having to re-upload everything or manually choose the files to move. I'm open to simply using a bash script that compares versions and copies each file (how? not that great with bash) since we'll be using Linux for development, but something with a web interface would be nice.
Thanks in advance for the help!
This seems more like a job for rsync than one for hg, given that that target doesn't have hg installed.
Something like so:
rsync -avz /path/to/local/files/ remote_host:/remote/path/
This would transfer all files, recursively (-r), from .../local/files/ and place them in /remote/path. The -az compresses and perserves file attributes.
rsync takes care of only transferring files that have changed. Be sure to watch for trailing slashed when specifying source paths, they matter (see the link above).

Resources