Total newbie question but what is the best practice when it comes to using SSH with Git? I'm working on a WordPress project. In the root I have gulp and other dev files/folders like SASS and Scripts that I don't need on the server and in the same project I have my WordPress folder that contains a theme and a few custom plugins. As you can imagine when the theme or any of the plugins are ready to be deployed I don't want to pull everything in my repository on the server. So far as a newbie I've always just pull and pushed the entire repository and used FTP to upload what I need to the server, so how is this done with SSH and Git and is there a better way to have my setup?
EDIT: To make my question a little bit more clear let me give you an example of what I think my issue is. In my main project folder, I have a SASS folder next to my WordPress folder. All I really need to deploy to the server is the WordPress folder. My build process that happens on my dev machine combines all of the SASS files into a single CSS that is then placed into the WordPress folder. I need the SASS folder to be tracked by Git so that any other developer can pull them and continue developing so I can't have git ignore it. However none of those SASS files need to be on the server for WordPress to work either. I just simply need to deploy the WordPress folder and everything that's in it.
I understand the idea of creating a bare repository on the server and using post-receive hook to point the git folder sitting outside your web root to point to where the web root is. But that's basically how GIT and SSH work and that's not answering my concern.
Not with Git
Git is not designed to pull specific files or directories only. It's a directed acyclic graph with binary blobs as objects and sometimes multiple objects get compacted into a single larger object.
Due to Git design, your specific request is not possible.
Alternatives
post-receive hook
If your website only contains simple static files then it's okay to push to a git repository over SSH. In reality, it's unlikely your repository will be large as long as you don't have non-text files.
Take for example the following setup.
/var/lib/www - apache web dir which is the cloned copy of www.git
/var/lib/www.git - a bare git repository.
/var/lib/www.git/hooks/post-recieve - A server side git hook. It can be a shell script that pulls the www repository when this repository is updated.
Sample post-recieve hook script:
#!/bin/bash
cd /home/sam/sandbox/git-hooks/www
unset GIT_DIR
git fetch origin master
git reset --hard origin/master
Zip up build in a tar.gz
At the end of your build you can zip up your files in a tar.gz. This file should be hosted somewhere (perhaps GitHub releases if you're using GitHub). Some enterprises use on premise artifact hosting like Nexus or Artifactory.
The idea being: you have a tested artifact that has a specific sha256sum. The artifact you test is the exact same artifact which eventually goes to production.
Diving into more detail such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, and the software development life cycle might be out of scope for your question.
No best practice.
Git is for source control, not for deployment. There is no best practice for using git this way because git is not a deployment tool. You also don't need git history on your server. In fact, you don't need git at all unless you insist on using it for deployment. You are welcome to use it this way but it's not ideal because of exactly the kind of problem you're asking about.
What is the best practice?
There are a number of tools you could use to handle your deployments. Most of the tools generally let you set up a series of steps that let you deploy the code you want into the environment you want. You could go with simple tools such as Phing or Deployer in the PHP world, or something more sophisticated like Puppet or Chef if you have more complex needs. You could just write your own bash scripts if what you need is really very simple. I recommend Phing or Deployer given the info you've provided. https://deployer.org/ https://www.phing.info/
You'll just configure whichever tool you want to ssh into your target box and copy over only the files you want into the directory you want on the server, in whatever way you would like to do that. Usually, you have the script copy files into a temp dir, tarball them up, ssh them over and untar them. After that, you'll usually do some additional work on the server to move files around, change symlinks, whatever else you might need to do.
What about compiled SASS, ES6 js files, or modern static stuff?
All you need to do is add steps to the handle the static files and where you want them to go. Include the generated static files in your tarball when you push stuff up, and put them in the right directories in the server once you untar it.
When you configured your SASS compiler, and whatever other pre-compiled static code you may have - you configured it to create a destination file. That is, the file(s) of actual CSS and JS that they generate. That's all you need to bring along - and if you have the destination directory set to be inside your wordpress theme, you may not even have to pay all that much special attention to it's handling. You may need to move them somewhere else once they are on the server but that all depends on the specific setup in your server, which I think is outside the scope of this question.
Additional Notes:
You didn't ask about this but I thought it was worth mentioning, that you shouldn't be sending the entire wordpress repository every time you update. Just like you don't need the uncompiled SASS code, you also don't need to be repackaging core WordPress. You don't even need to be commiting core WordPress, its a dependency and you don't need to be changing it.
All that should be getting committed by you is your theme and plugin code, and the uncompiled static files. Compiled static files and external dependencies like the WordPress core don't belong in your git history. For deployment purposes, WordPress should already be installed. The stuff in your tarballs should just be plugins and themes, and additional static files if they aren't already in there for some reason.
TLDR;
Don't use git for this. Use a tool like Phing or Deployer. Build your static files into your theme, and create phing/deployer scripts that tarball up only the code you want, SSH's it over to your server, and untars it into the directories you want. If you have some special location on the server for your static files, just make sure to add steps in your script for that.
So, based on your question and comment, there are three computers involved. There is a web server (when you say "server", I take it as a Web server in this scenario, or the server computer that runs a Web server program). There is another server where your git repo is hosted. And, there is your dev workstation. Is this correct?
It seems like, you have a cloned git repo on your Web server. Your current practice/workflow appears to be (1) (based on your expression "SSH'ed into my server") you log into the web server via SSH (just like Telnet) from your workstation (SSH is just a protocol, which can be used for different purposes). (2) you pull from your repo on hosted service (e.g., github), and (3) deploy it to your "www" directory on the same server. Is this correct?
(I can think of an alternative scenario based on your use of the word "FTP", etc., but let's focus on the above scenario, for now.)
Now, your question is, whenever you "pull" (on your Web server), you feel like you are pulling everything from your repo on your hosted service. And, is there a better way? Am I understanding your question correctly?
If so, as another commenter suggested, git (and, any version control system, in general) is very good at fetching "deltas" only. If you are worried about "fetching everything" every time you pull (the step (2) above), then your worry is unfounded.
Now, the question is, why do you have a git repo on your Web server, if that is indeed the case? This is a pretty legit setup and I've done this before (e.g., on EC2). But, as a best practice, people generally don't do that on "production" servers. It's because you have to "build" your web app, and you really don't want to do that on production servers.
The next question is, what do you exactly do in Step (3)? The build process (whatever process you use) typically generates an "output" which can be directly deployed to the web server. (The convention is the output is generally a single folder, "public", "www", "dist", or whatever, or a single file (e.g., tar.gz, zip, jar, war), etc.) Regardless of whether you build the deployable output on your dev workstation (or, a build machine) or on your Web server, you don't generally do "deltas" in this context. Even if you've only changed a single file (say, a CSS file), you generally build the whole output again (instead of, say, just replacing the changed CSS file only). When you use FTP to upload files, etc., you can selectively upload certain files and/or directories, etc., but as a general practice, we don't do that. We always build the complete output from scratch and deploy it to the Web server. (This is mainly to reduce the potential deployment errors and increase the reliability.)
So, to answer your question, (A) If you are pulling git repo on your Web server, you should really change that practice, and move the build process to your dev computer or a dedicated build machine. (BTW, services like github, gitlab, TFS, ... provide the build service for you.) (B) If you are currently selectively FTP'ing your web app files to your Web server, then you should really consider adopting some kind of formal build, and deployment, process moving forward.
After your SASS build process is done use scp or rsync to move the files to the prod server:
scp -r /[local wordpress dir]/wp-content/themes/your-theme/ username#your.prod.server.com:/path/to/dir/wordpress/wp-content/themes/
scp -r /[local wordpress dir]/wp-content/plugins/* username#your.prod.server.com:/path/to/dir/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/
I am working in a project and using git ssh with bitbucket following is the process i am using it may work for you also if not please correct me :
Step 1 ->I have setup git and create repo in bit-bucket.
Step 2 ->And setup project with my local and linked with my repo.
Step 3 ->connect my server using ssh.
Step 4 ->Work in my local and commit and push all changes in my git repo.
Step 5 ->Run git pull on ssh so all changes deployed in my server.
I am using above process and i love this process.i have used .gitignore file that is not required for push on my repo.
Thanks
I usually deploy my vendors with a simple composer install in production.
I would prefer not using composer in production, so I'd need to build the vendors from my machine and deploy them in production.
I could copy the vendor directory but I'll certainly have to install other files like app/bootstrap.cache.php or other autoloader.php
2 questions so:
What are these files I could install/update ?
Are there any known practices to deploy pre-built vendors anyway ?
I would say the procedure is pretty straighforward (at least it works for me that way): To deploy your application, you'd create a new directory, export the code from a tag into it (i.e. you don't export all repository-managing data like a .git directory). You then run composer install --no-dev, which will do some work, and should also run anything that is mentioned in the scripts in the composer.json file.
The result in this previously empty directory goes to the production server in whatever way you like, be it SCP, SFTP, rsync... There is no real "magic" going on here, essentially it is copying of files.
You may want to make sure you can roll back quickly, so I'd recommend to deploy every version into a designated directory, and then link the current version with a symlink. As an example: You had deployed your old version in /srv/www/htdocs/app-1.0 and symlinked the directory /srv/www/htdocs/app to point to this directory. The vhost uses the generic app directory to serve the app.
The deployment will create a new directory /srv/www/htdocs/app-1.1, and putting it live will simply delete the old symlink and create a new one to the new directory. This should put your new version live instantly. Rolling back would mean to delete the symlink and create the one pointing to the old version again.
YMMV, because things like caches will affect the outcome, but this is not in the scope of how and where to use Composer to deploy software.
I'm going to start using grunt-rev & grunt-usemin with grunt-watch for my web development needs (a RESTful Web App specifically).
I have a local development machine which will run grunt-watch to attach revision identifiers on my JS files. I git commit and git push my tree to a git repo, and then ask the production server to git pull the changes from the git repo to show them to the web visitors.
The problem is that I don't want my git repo to store different filenames (due to grunt-rev) on each commit. That would be bad, because then I wouldn't be able to do git diff between commits without having my screen get flooded with the contents of files that appear and disappear, and also it could (sometimes) take up a lot more storage than if it only stored the small diffs of the files.
The only solution I see is to add the build directory containing the versioned filenames in my .gitignore, so as to not store those files (with the constantly changing filenames) in git. But wouldn't that mean that I would have to run grunt-watch on my production server as well, in order to produce the build directory with the versioned filenames there as well? But that gets complicated: a new process has to run on the remote server, maybe with its small chances of error in processing the files. Not the solution I was hoping for.
Do you people have another solution? What would you suggest I did?
What I do to solve this, is to remove previous "build" files before committing and deploying a new file. There is no need to keep older files that have been generated, because you can always rebuild them with the source files (which are in git).
In Chapter 2.5 of Discover Meteor by Tom Coleman, the instructions for deploying to EC2 require me to first bundle the app, move the tarball one directory up, then unzip that tarball again, before running node on the app.
This seems rather a tedious procedure as I'll have to bundle and unzip after every commit to test the app. Also, isn't this just the same thing as moving the entire app one directory up, or does bundling then unzipping do some magic that makes it run right?
Bundling creates a production application, optimized to run on the live environment, while your working directory is more suitable for development. For example, bundled app only have one js and one css file instead of tens to hundreds.
Additionally, bundled app contains all the engine needed to run with plain node, so that you may run it in an environment without Meteor.
I've been developing with Symfony1.4 'till now and had no problem to deploy a project or update it into a remote hosting. I just used sfFtpPlugin and everything was perfect: http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sfFtpPlugin
But now I'm starting with Symfony2 (2.2.0) and the first of all I had this question: how to update it when I make changes?
For the first time deploy I know there are some options: upload full project by FTP or use Maestro (e.g. offered in the ServerGrove.com hostings) With those tools I can upload everything, but in the case where I need to update... ¿50? files, I cannot manually do by FTP, of course.
Thanks everyone for helping!
P.S: Aditional info: I have some SVN knowledge and started learning GIT a few days ago.
The documentation on this is fantastic. The Cookbook provides workflows for both Git and SVN.
http://symfony.com/doc/current/cookbook/workflow/index.html
If you have no shell available, you can use composer on your local machine to update your project and then FTP the entire project over.
This covers how to store settings for different environments:
http://symfony.com/doc/current/cookbook/configuration/environments.html
Personally I use a private Satis repo for deploying all my code.
That way I never have to use FTP, just composer create-project/install/update.