Automatic Deployment with Gitolite

About Gitolite

About a year and a half ago, I came across a great open-source git repository management tool called Gitolite. It’s a great tool for hosting and managing git repositories. It worked especially well for me because I run my own web server where I could set it up. If you’d like to give it a try or read up on it, I suggest you visit the Gitolite documentation.

Why Automatic Deployment?

Now, having worked in web development for at least a few years, I wanted a simpler way to automatically deploy my sites. Ideally, this should use Git. I’ve become quite fond of Git, so I’ve been using it for all my projects lately. Before I even open a text editor to start a new project, I’ve usually already typed git init (or, as it is with Gitolite, git clone).

There’s something to be said for entering git push and having your commits reflected live on the web. It’s not something you want for every site, but it can certainly be useful when you want it.

Getting it Set Up

If you’ve managed to get Gitolite set up, you probably won’t have much trouble with getting the rest figured out. If you do happen to have some questions, I’ll do my best to answer them.

In order to set up your automatic deployment, you’ll need direct access to the gitolite account on your server. As a matter of fact, having root access would probably be helpful. Because unfortunately, the autodeployment isn’t something you can just set up using the gitolite-admin repository (for some very good security reasons, I might add). With that in mind, follow along with the steps below.

1. Add your web server user and your gitolite user to the same group. While this probably isn’t strictly necessary, it’s what I decided to do to make it work. Mainly, you just need your web server to be able to properly access the files that your gitolite user will be checking out.

   In my case, I simply created a new group and added both users to that group using usermod (check out usermod’s man page for more info). However, as I said, you can handle this however you’d like to, especially if your UNIX knowledge surpasses mine (which certainly wouldn’t surprise me).

2. Create your repository and deployment directory.

3. Change your deployment directory to allow the gitolite user access. This will depend on exactly how you handled things in step 1, but if you followed my pattern, I’d suggest changing the group of the directory to the group you added in step 1. In case you aren’t completely familiar with how you do this, you can try chown user:group directory -R on your target directory (More info here).

4. Add the following to your /home/{gitolite_user}/.gitolite/hooks/common/post-receive script:

   if [ "$GL_REPO" == "gitolite/path/to/repo" ]; 
       git --work-tree /path/to/webroot --git-dir ./ 
       find /path/to/webroot -type f -print | xargs chmod 664 
       find /path/to/webroot -type d -print | xargs chmod 775
   fi
   

5. Modify the script (from above) as needed. Basically, this script will run any time a repo is pushed to the server. If the repo matches the path you put in, it’ll execute the script within the if statement. That simply checks the repo out to the directory you specify, then adjusts the permissions on the files and subdirectories. You can modify the script as needed, because your specific case may need some special treatment.

6. Push to your repo!

Hopefully I’ve covered everything. If you try this tutorial and run into problems, let me know in the comments and I’ll do what I can to get you sorted out.