Michael Hutchinson

When it comes to hosting web applications these days, web developers live in a time of plenty. We have many options available to us, including using our own in-house hardware, using a virtual private server (VPS) like those available from Linode, or using a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) provider like Heroku.

At one point or another in setting up your application on a remote server, you may need to set up a brand new remote Git repository. Different developers use different methods of course, but I thought it might be helpful if I shared mine. I remember the first time I tried to do this, and it wasn’t clear at all. There’s a little “magic” in the post-receive hook, but we’ll go through this step-by-step, and we should be fine.

For this example we’re going to assume:

• That we’re pushing to a typical Linode VPS.
• That we’re using the default SSH port to communicate with the remote server.
• That the local repository we want to push to the remote server is named “jenkins”.
• That the directory structure we want on the remote server is something like this:

  -- var
  ---- www
  ------ jenkins
  ------ jenkins.git
  

  The actual repository will be stored in the “jenkins” directory, and the Git repository will reside in the “jenkins.git” directory.

Of course this technique is easily adapted to other circumstances— I’m just using the assumptions to establish a common starting point for the example.

Let’s get started!

• On the REMOTE server, go to the directory where you want to create our two directories: In our example, this would be “/var/www”:

  cd /var/www
  

• On the REMOTE server, we now create our bare Git repository:

  mkdir jenkins.git
  cd jenkins.git
  git init --bare
  

• On the REMOTE server, now we add our post-receive hook in the new, empty repository.

  We’ll put a file in the “jenkins.git/hooks” directory called “post-receive” that will tell Git to actually publish the repository to the “jenkins” directory whenever it receives changes:

  echo \
  "GIT_WORK_TREE=/var/www/jenkins git checkout -f" \
  > hooks/post-receive
  

  Be sure that there is a space between “jenkins” and “git” in that ECHO command. This is where we tell Git that we actually want to publish the repository to the “jenkins” directory, not “jenkins.git”.

• On the REMOTE server, we make the post-receive hook executable:

  chmod a+x hooks/post-receive
  

• On the REMOTE server, we create the directory that will actually hold our application:

  mkdir /var/www/jenkins
  

• On the LOCAL machine, we add the new remote to our .git/config file. You can either do this with the Git command:

  git remote add linode moc.elpmaxenull@resu/var/www/jenkins.git
  

  or do it by appending this to the .git/config file:

  [remote "linode"]
    url = ssh://moc.elpmaxenull@resu/var/www/jenkins.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/linode/*
  

• Finally, on the LOCAL machine, we can push the LOCAL repository to the REMOTE server:

  git push linode master
  

And we’re done!

From now on, whenever you want to push your changes to the remote server, just do

git push linode master