Using git to manage a website

by achew22 • 15 years ago

172 51 15 years ago

veb• 15 years ago

Is it bad, that I simply SSH into the server and do a "git pull"?

dolinsky• 15 years ago

Good / bad are relative terms. Neither situation would be recommended for a site with a code base that pulls from multiple resources / pushes to multiple servers on every release, but for a single server environment this could suffice.

As for the difference b/w your method and the OPs, he defines it here :

> 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.

gvb• 15 years ago

To elaborate on dolinsky and the article, if your web server is doing a "git pull", it means it has ssh access into your workstation. If someone breaks into your web server, this means that they have ssh access into your workstation as well by simply using the keys on your web server. This is bad, very bad.

If you push to your web server, only your public key is exposed if your web server is compromised.

russell_h• 15 years ago

Not necessarily. If you run an ssh-agent locally and configure ForwardAgent to 'yes' for connections to your web server you can ssh to your server and use ssh from it without actually putting your private key on it.

I'd still recommend pushing to a server though.

cookiecaper• 15 years ago

I don't know if he meant that he git pulls from his workstation. I git push out to a bare repository on my server, and then I ssh in and git pull from the local bare repository into the project's working directory on my server. This doesn't leave the keys for my workstation on the server, but I still have to log in and git pull in the wd.

rmc2• 15 years ago

One advantage of the article's method is that it works if your workstation doesn't have a public IP address or is behind NAT / a firewall. It also works if you move around. With the article's method, you could have your laptop at home update your website, then go down to the local coffee shop and update your website from there.

steveklabnik2• 15 years ago

Only once you have more than one server.

georgecmu6• 15 years ago

Can I use git to manage a Drupal-managed website?

ElbertF• 15 years ago

Why not? Were I work we use Drupal almost exclusively and use Git for everything.

georgecmu6• 15 years ago

Isn't the content stored in a database rather than static pages? Do you do regular commits of your database files?

fungi2• 15 years ago

that's what we do in conjunction with http://drupal.org/project/features, bugs aside it works well

but what you want in code and what you want in the DB will vary from page to page and feature to feature so often just manually redo stuff (in dev env and then again in production) because deploying changes by code is more effort then its worth.

georgecmu6• 15 years ago

Managing the codebase is straightforward -- that's what git's designed for. My question was more about the actual site contents, which will reside in the database. Can you use git for tracking changes to the contents?

kevinburke• 15 years ago

I use Fabric with mercurial to achieve a similar effect typing "fab prod deploy" - see Steve Losh's blog posts or bitbucket.org/kevinburke/goodmorningcmc

StavrosK• 15 years ago

Yep, same here. I wonder why more people don't do it, my fabric scripts basically push to production and then fabric logs in and updates, restarts services, etc.

rapind• 15 years ago

You can do the same with Capistrano. However for a very basic static site it does sound simpler to just use a post-receive hook rather than having a script ssh in and do a pull.

trusko3• 15 years ago

That's my preferred way of deployment as well. fabric + git

jbrennan2• 15 years ago

This is basically how I run my publishing engine (you can read more about it at the "Colophon" part of this article: http://nearthespeedoflight.com/article/about_the_redesign ).

I wanted to teach myself Ruby and I figured this was a great way to maintain a site, as I'm terrible with both SQL and security. Git solves security and DataMapper solves the SQL, and my Ruby lubricates the rest.

soult2• 15 years ago

You could use git directly for metadata instead of relying on some JSON file. Git will tell you when an article was created and by whom. It will also tell you when and by whom each edit was made.

jbrennan2• 15 years ago

True. But my metadata needs exceed simply who wrote the article, I also have things like tags, pubdate, update, etc.

My system actually allows for the metadata to be embedded in the main article file, but it ended up being simpler for me to split the files most of the time (the editing app I wrote does this for me, so I mostly forget about it now).

dedward• 15 years ago

I've played with this - in the end I ended up using custom scripts and/or Capistrano scripts (along with git of course) to handle actual deployments. It provided more control and more features, while still letting me leverage git.

bigiain• 15 years ago

Yeah, sounds familiar. I've been cooking up a way to manage a locally mastered static html website hosted in Amazon CloudFront. I may well use it as an opportunity to learn git (over SNV)...

Pyrodogg• 15 years ago

I've been using Joe Maller's write-up[1] as a guide for a while.

I see this strategy removes the need for a second repo on the server. Other than removing a layer which would save space and lower the likelihood of errors in general are their significant pros/cons to either method.

[1] http://joemaller.com/990/a-web-focused-git-workflow/

boyter2• 15 years ago

I do something similar, but I keep the "central" repository in another location on the server and pull from that.

andrewcamel• 15 years ago

That's what I do, except I use svn rather than git.

boyter2• 15 years ago

Nice to hear I am not alone on this. The advantage I find is that it makes my deployments more explicit, and my pushes too and from the repository are as often as I feel.

With GIT thats a moot point in the linked article so long as you are using branches for everything and remembering to push them as well, but sometimes I just want to fix something quickly and do so without a branch. I dont care what people say when you start storing a lot of stuff in GIT a branch can take some time to process.

buckwild• 15 years ago

What about using git to backup an entire hard drive? Maybe using bitbucket (or github if you don't mind sharing your data with the world).

Living on the cloud has never been so easy :-D

SeoxyS• 15 years ago

Performance would be nightmarish. Git is super elegant and great, but not very performant. Imagine having to deltify a terabyte of data? Good luck with that!

riledhel• 15 years ago

wasn't it because he needed better performance one of the reasons Torvalds created git? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)

beoba2• 15 years ago

You should look at something more along the lines of rdiff-backup (or whatever's fashionable these days) for that.

Using git would be pretty pointless, unless you're going to be frequently branching and merging against your mp3s or something.

js2• 15 years ago

See https://github.com/apenwarr/bup

beagle3• 15 years ago

bup! bup! bup!

https://github.com/apenwarr/bup

trusko3• 15 years ago

Have a question. This is nice for simple HTML. How about deploying site were you have to migrate the database etc. This approach wouldn't work. I use fabric with git right now, works well.

jefe78• 15 years ago

One solution that occurred to me, was to setup a(assuming MySQL)mirrored database. Another idea is to setup a MySQL dump script or something similar.

Just a couple of ideas :)

trusko3• 15 years ago

I think it is good idea for static sites, for everything else you would be rediscovering fabric and similar tools.

JamieEi• 15 years ago

So in other words Heroku minus all that pesky code?

soult2• 15 years ago

That's similar to my private website (soultcer.com). I use git to create and store the content, and a wiki as content management system. It's nice to work on your website, and all you need is a git push for deploy. If I make a mistake or someone vandalizes the wiki, reverting is easy.

clickable: http://www.soultcer.com/

Edit: In case you are interested, the wiki software was written by a friend and is open source: https://github.com/patrikf/ewiki

glenngillen• 15 years ago

It's probably worth checking out NestaCSM (http://effectif.com/nesta) if you're interested in doing this.

Sinatra in front, but all your posts are managed by Git and can be Markdown/Textile/HAML (or anything supported by Tilt iirc). Push it to Heroku if you want easy/free hosting.

Takes care of publishing an RSS feed, tags/categorisation, and a bunch of other nifty things beyond just generating a static site.

Example: http://blog.peepcode.com/

(disclaimer: I used to work with Graham who created it, but I genuinely think it's awesome and use it for almost every site I build now)

chalst• 15 years ago

The general approach of putting together your website on one machine, the coding machine, and publishing it to your server is one I use, although I prefer a complex build on my design machine and then rsync it with the server.

Checkout Chronicle (http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle/). I've put up a HN thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2186798).

Using git to manage a website

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