The HTML source for my (i.e., this) web site lives in a Git repository on my local workstation. This page describes how I set things up so that I can make changes live by running just “git push web”. The one-line summary: push into a remote repository that has a detached work tree, and a post-receive hook that runs “git checkout -f”.

The local repository

It doesn’t really matter how the local repository is set up, but for the sake of argument, let’s suppose you’re starting one from scratch.

$ mkdir website && cd website $ git init Initialized empty Git repository in /home/ams/website/.git/ $ echo ‘Hello, world!’ > index.html $ git add index.html $ git commit -q -m “The humble beginnings of my web site.”

Anyway, however you got there, you have a repository whose contents you want to turn into a web site.

The remote repository

I assume that the web site will live on a server to which you have ssh access, and that things are set up so that you can ssh to it without having to type a password (i.e., that your public key is in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and you are running ssh-agent locally). On the server, we create a new repository to mirror the local one.

$ mkdir website.git && cd website.git $ git init —bare Initialized empty Git repository in /home/ams/website.git/

Then we define (and enable) a post-receive hook that checks out the latest tree into the web server’s DocumentRoot (this directory must exist; Git will not create it for you):

$ mkdir /var/www/www.example.org $ cat > hooks/post-receive #!/bin/sh GIT_WORK_TREE=/var/www/www.example.org git checkout -f $ chmod +x hooks/post-receive

Note: earlier versions of this howto depended on setting the git config variables core.worktree to the target directory, core.bare to false, and receive.denycurrentbranch to ignore. But these changes are not needed if you use GIT_WORK_TREE (which didn’t work when I first wrote the howto), and the remote repository can remain bare. Back on the workstation, we define a name for the remote mirror, and then mirror to it, creating a new “master” branch there.

$ git remote add web ssh://server.example.org/home/ams/website.git $ git push web +master:refs/heads/master

On the server, /var/www/www.example.org should now contain a copy of your files, independent of any .git metadata.

The update process

Nothing could be simpler. In the local repository, just run

$ git push web

This will transfer any new commits to the remote repository, where the post-receive hook will immediately update the DocumentRoot for you. (This is more convenient than defining your workstation as a remote on the server, and running “git pull” by hand or from a cron job, and it doesn’t require your workstation to be accessible by ssh.)

Notes

A few more things bear mentioning. First, the work tree (/var/www/www.example.org above) must be writable by the user who runs the hook (or the user needs sudo access to run git checkout -f, or something similar). Also, the work tree does not need to correspond exactly to your DocumentRoot. Your repository may represent only a subdirectory of it, or even contain it as a subdirectory. In the work tree, you will need to set the environment variable GIT_DIR to the path to website.git before you can run any git commands (e.g. “git status”). 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. (Thanks to Miklos Vajna for pointing this out.) You can push to more than one remote repository by adding more URLs under the [remote "web"] section in your .git/config.

[remote “web”] url = ssh://server.example.org/home/ams/website.git url = ssh://other.example.org/home/foo/website.git

There are also other hooks. See githooks(5) for details. For example, you could use pre-receive to accept or deny a push based on the results of an HTML validator. Or you could do more work in the post-receive hook (such as send email to co-maintainers; see contrib/hooks/post-receive-email). I wrote this after reading Daniel Miessler’s piece on Using Git to maintain your website. He pushes to a bare repository on the server and pulls changes into a second clone that is used as the DocumentRoot. My implementation has fewer moving parts, and keeps .git separate from the DocumentRoot. Note: some people have reported that this strategy doesn’t work under git 1.5.4.3 (because the git checkout -f fails). I know it does work with 1.6.x. I haven’t investigated further.