Using Git Hooks for Continuous Integration on Live Production Server

15 Aug 2021

This article is about to set up Git Hooks for Continuous Integration on live production server.

Live Production Server Setup

Live directory: 

/home/yourusername/liveproductionapps

Repo directory:

/home/yourusername/liveproductionrepository.git

 

Create Repository

First thing first, you need to login to your production server using SSH method and then type this command:

mkdir repository && cd repository
mkdir liveproductionrepository.git && cd liveproductionrepository.git
git init --bare

'--bare' means that the liveproductionrepository folder will have no source files, just the version control.

 

Hooks

Inside liveproductionrepository.git (Git repositories) have a folder called 'hooks'. This folder contains some sample files for possible actions that you can hook and perform custom actions set by you. You can read more documentation about Hook on Git Documentation, because on this tutorial I will straight forward to set up Continous Integration on production server.

In liveproductionrepository.git, you can find 'hooks' folder and you can change directory to the 'hooks' folder by typing:

cd hooks

Now, create a file 'post-receive'. The 'post-receive' file will be looked into every time a push is completed and it's saying that your files need to be in /home/yourusername/liveproductionapps

vim post-receive

After that, set the directory that we want to set up for Continous Integration

#!/bin/sh
git --work-tree=/home/yourusername/repository/liveproductionapps \
--git-dir=/home/yourusername/repository/liveproductionrepository.git checkout -f

Save it

:wq

And make it executable

chmod +x post-receive

 

Local Machine Setup

First quit from the server by typing:

exit

Go to your project directory, for example:

cd myproject

Then:

git init

After that we need to configure the remote path of our repository. Tell Git to add a remote called 'origin: 

git remote add origin ssh://user@mydomain.com/home/yourusername/repository/liveproductionrepository.git

Let's assume that you already have project ready in this folder. We should do the usual git steps of adding the files and commit with a message:

git add .
git commit -m "first push for CI"

To finish everything, just push it by typing:

git push origin main

Counting objects: 10, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (10/10), done.
Writing objects: 100% (10/10), 10.56 KiB, done.
Total 10 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To ssh://user@mydomain.com/home/yourusername/repository/liveproductionrepo.git*
[new branch]      main -> main

 

Now the setup is done and you can push your development project from local machine to the live production server.