deployment | saintsjd

Heroku is sweet hosting platform which offers a pure git deployment workflow. I love using it to deploy my Rails projects. I miss using when I deploy a PHP application.

Lets fix that…. Here is a quick heroku-ish git deployment workflow for your PHP applications. We will be using WordPress for this example. The same steps can be adapted for Drupal or any other PHP application.

Our goal is to development and test new features, themes, and plugins for WordPress locally on our development machine. When changes are working properly, we want to deploy them to our live site with one command:

git push origin master

#1: Set up password-less login to your webserver with SSH keys

To run deployments we will need to access our live webserver without a password. Follow the steps in Setting up ssh public keys to login to webserver without a password.

For each user or machine from which you want to allow deploys you will need to install its SSH key using the steps above.

#2: Setup Code Repository on the Webserver

I connect to the webserver via SSH. My home directory is /home/saintsjd.

I have a /home/saintsjd/www folder for my website and PHP files. I also have a /home/saintsjd/code folder for my git repositories.

cd into /home/saintsjd/code and create a folder called blog.git

cd /home/saintsjd/code
mkdir blog.git

Next, initialize a bare git repository

cd blog.git
git init --bare blog.git

This gives me a git repository to store my code at /home/saintsjd/code/blog.git. I then disconnect from the SSH connection to the webserver.

#3: Setup Development Box

I have php, mysql, and apache running locally on my laptop. I create my WordPress themes, plugins, and updates on my laptop. After I test them, I deploy them to the live webserver for the world to see.

My local website folder is /home/jon/Website. To get started I clone my git repo locally:

git clone ssh://saintsjd@saintsjd.com/home/saintsjd/code/blog.git ./blogdev

This give me:

/home/jon/Website/blogdev

Now i can start filling in code!

Into the /home/jon/Website/blogdev/ folder I copy in all the files for WordPress and run the installer.

Next, I need to add a gitignore file to the project. I use the one here. https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/Wordpress.gitignore. I copy the contents of that file into a .gitignore file in /home/jon/Website/blogdev/.gitignore. I then:

git add .
git commit -m "inital commit"

To send my changes to the server I type:

git push origin master

#4: Setup Live Webserver

Now I install WordPress on my server. I SSH to my server. There my website directory is /home/saintsjd/www. I need to remove this folder so I backup everything in this directory. Then I remove it and recreate it using git clone. I type:

rm -rf /home/saintsjd/www
git clone /home/saintsjd/code/blog.git /home/saintsjd/www

I then browse to my website http://www.saintsjd.com and run the wordpress installer so the database gets installed on the server.

IMPORTANT: Protect your .git repository from prying eyes

I don’t really want others reading my source code from the git repository via http://www.saintsjd.com/.git/

I prevent this by running:

chmod -R og-rx /home/saintsjd/www/.git

I also add a .htaccess file to the .git folder containing:

Deny from all

#5: Automated Deployment Script

Now that wordpress is installed on both my local machine and my live webserver, I want to be able to deploy any changes I make on my local copy with one git push command. I can do this using a Git hook.

I SSH to my webserver and create a file /home/saintsjd/code/blog.git/hooks/post-receive

touch /home/saintsjd/code/blog.git/hooks/post-receive

I make the file executable

chmod u+x /home/saintsjd/code/blog.git/hooks/post-receive

Then I edit the file

nano -w /home/saintsjd/code/blog.git/hooks/post-receive

and place this code in it (adjusting the config variables to match your server settings)

#!/bin/bash
#CONFIG
LIVE="/home/saintsjd/www"

read oldrev newrev refname
if [ $refname = "refs/heads/master" ]; then  
  echo "===== DEPLOYING TO LIVE SITE ====="  
  unset GIT_DIR  
  cd $LIVE  
  git pull origin master  
  echo "===== DONE ====="
fi

#6 Let the (heroku-like) Fun Begin: Automated Deployment for WordPress

Now that everything is setup. I am free to develop new themes, install new plugins and update on my local development box. Once everything is working properly locally commit and push. The post-receive hook automatically deploys the code changes to my live webserver for me.

Here are my steps:

Make changes to my local site’s code: new theme, new plug-in, etc
test, test and test so more!
When I am happy I commit to the local git repository:
```
git add .
git commit -m "new theme css for header"
```
I push and deploy to the server using one command:
```
git push origin master
```
After the post-receive hook moves the new code to the live website. I open http://www.saintsjd.com/wp-admin on the live server to trigger and database updates that need to run

That’s it… heroku-ish git deployment for WordPress websites.

——

UPDATE: This post is out of date. Please see the new and improved version of this page Automated Deployment of WordPress using git

——-

Distributed revision control systems are an excellent way to manage the source code of web applications. Currently I use git. In the past, I have used bzr and hg. All three great tools.

Git is now my favorite for a number of reasons.

While the tools are great at managing code and facilitating distributed development, it did take a while for me to find an efficient way to deploy my version controlled code to a live web server. The following is an outline of a simple workflow for developing and deploying web applications using distributed revision control systems. You could apply these methods to either bzr, hg, or git.

I keep development copies of the websites I manage for clients on my local machine. I develop and create new features locally on branched copies of the source code. When I complete and test a feature I commit the changes to the central code repository and deploy it to the live server using a few different methods.

Creating your code repository

A code repository is a place to save your code. Its important to not that the repository itself is not a functioning website. It is a file often on a completely different server than the live website and the development boxes. There are two options for creating a code repository. On is github.com. I use GitHub to store my open source projects. For projects with closed source code I store my repositories on server which allows ssh connections in a folder that is not accessible via the web. You can pay for a github account which allows you to create private repositories.

Creating an repository on Github.com
Follow the step here: http://help.github.com/

Creating a repository on your own SSH server
I will create my repository in a non-webaccessible directory on my live server. so… on my live server I will have:

/home/jon/public_html (my live website folder)
/home/jon/code (a private folder not accessible from the web to store my source code)

Log into the server via SSH
my home directory is /home/jon
I create a directory /home/jon/code for all my repositories /home/jon/code
cd into the code directory and type:

git init --bare drupaltest.git

Setting Up Local Development Website
Change directories on your local development computer into a web accessible directory. On my machine the local folder /home/jon/Website is accessible at http://localhost/jon/. So I open the terminal and run:

cd /home/jon/Website

Then:

git clone jon@saintsjd.com:code/drupaltest.git drupaltest

This command clones the repository to my local machine and creates a localfolder called drupaltest. I can now start adding files to it. Lets unzip a fresh copy of Drupal 7 and copy all the files into the drupaltest folder. I then browse to http://localhost/jon/drupaltest/ and I run the Drupal installer.

With drupal installed we are ready to start committing our code to our git repo.

We first need to create a .gitignore file in the root of our web application /home/jon/Website/drupaltest/.gitignore. This file tells git to ignore certain files. We want to keep our settings.php file out of the repository and our sites/default/files folder out of the repository because the settings and files on our development computer will be different from the settings.php and files on the live server. My .gitignore contains:

sites/default/files
sites/default/private
sites/default/settings.php

With /home/jon/Website/drupaltest/.gitignore created, I run:

git add .
git commit -m "initial commit"

I then send my code up to the repository on my server. Remember the repository is just a place to keep my code. It is not a live functioning website. We will create that live site later. To push the code to my respository I run

git push origin master

And I know the command was successful when I see something like:

Counting objects: 1099, done.
Delta compression using up to 2 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (1087/1087), done.
Writing objects: 100% (1099/1099), 2.81 MiB | 324 KiB/s, done.
Total 1099 (delta 119), reused 0 (delta 0)
To jon@saintsjd.com:code/drupaltest.git
* [new branch]      master -> master

Creating a Live Website from our Repository

The command in this section only need to be run once when you first setup your website. Like the install we ran locally we now need to run an Drupal install on our server to setup a separate database for live data. I ssh to my server and change directories into my public_html folder.

My code repo is stored on the same server as my live website but is in a folder that is not accessible from the web. Remember that i have:

/home/jon/public_html (my live website folder)
/home/jon/code (a private folder not accessible from the web to store my source code)

I SSH to the server and run:

cd public_html
git clone /home/jon/code/drupaltest.git drupaltest

If your repository is on github or on another server you will need to adjust the “/home/jon/code/drupaltest.git” path in the command above.

Then I:

cd drupaltest
ls

I see all my files listed. Now I browse to my website http://www.saintsjd.com/drupaltest/ and run the drupal installer.

With a working site at http://www.saintsjd.com/drupaltest/ we are ready to begin making our changes to the website and deploying the changes to the live site using git. The steps that follow are the steps you will repeat for each new feature that you want to add to your website.

Deploying using git

There are many automated ways of deploying code using git. I recommend Fabric and Heroku for Rails apps. I will show only one basic manual deployment method here.

Our workflow will be:

Develop and test a new features for our website on our local development box
Commit and push the new code to the repository
Pull the tested code from the repository to the live website

We repeat this workflow each time we add a new feature to our website.

Lets say I want to add the pathauto module to my drupaltest website. I download the module from http://drupal.org/project/pathauto and the token module http://drupal.org/project/token, unzip, and copy the modules to my sites/all/modules folder on my local development machine.

I browse to http://localhost/jon/drupaltest/#overlay=%3Fq%3Dadmin%252Fmodules and enable the module. I configure it and test that it actually works.

Once I am happy that the module works well. I use git to commit the new code to my repository.

git add . (stages our new code)
git commit -m “adding pathauto module” (commit our new code to the local repo)
git push origin master (send the code to our origin repo on the server via ssh)

I can then SSH to my live server and cd into the public_html/drupaltest/ folder. Synchronizing my new code changes is as easy as:

git pull

After I pull in the new code I need to enable and configure the module on the live site going to:

http://www.saintsjd.com/drupaltest/#overlay=admin/modules

Repeat the steps in the “Deploying with git” section each time you want to add a new feature to your website.

Important! Protect your .git folder on the live website using .htaccess

I don’t really want others reading my git repository on my live site by browsing to http://saintsjd.com/drupaltest/.git. I prevent this by running:

chmod -R og-rx /home/public_html/drupaltest/.git