how do I deploy multiple branches to different directories via git push?

Question

In production, I maintain two sites - beta and release. Each points to a different directory via a soft link (e.g.)

beta_public_html -> /home/scott/myapp/trunk/public
public_html      -> /home/scott/myapp/branches/1.2.3/public

I'm a longtime svn user, moving to git. I'm used to deploying via svn update and changing the soft link on a new branch, things are pretty simple.

Now I'm moving to git. I still need to have the two soft links (it's a Rails app using Passenger), though now I want them to point to two different git branches ("beta" and "release", say). And I want to be able to update them via git push (or git pull).

Question Part 1: I'm not sure the best way to do this.

The way I had started to do it was to just deploy to two different remotes, e.g.

git push ssh://[email protected]/home/scott/myapp-beta beta
git push ssh://[email protected]/home/scott/myapp-release release

But this doesn't work because push doesn't update the working tree by default.

So I go into the remote directories and run git reset --hard the first time, and it pulls the working tree. But I push again and I can't get the new push to show up - it just stays at the initial one.

(BTW, note that I can't seem to push to "myapp-beta.git" - that fails, I have to push to the directory name. I am worried that this is part of the problem, but I don't know what I did wrong here.)

So, if the answer to Question 1 is that my method is fine, Question Part 2: what's wrong with what I'm actually doing? If there are hooks I should be using, can someone point me to them?

(An answer to Question 1 that says "run these seven manual steps" will not be a terribly useful answer, seeing as svn checkout + ln -s are two steps.)

Thanks. I want to get back to writing code.

Answer 1

The article Git push is worse than worsless has an interesting discussion about a similar issue.

One of its solution and conclusion involves:

• a bare repository on the production server
• a cloned repository with a hook to pull what has been pushed into the bare one

So in your case,

• one bare repo on which you can push beta and release branches
• two cloned repo 'beta' and 'release' with a hook to pull their respective branches from the bare repo.

In short: one step: git push. No more link to manage (since the directory no longer represent a branch in Git, unlike SVN)

---

Regarding the hook part, a post-receive hook in the bare repo could be all what you need

See Git Tip: Auto update working tree via post-receive hook

$ cd bare
$ chmod +x .git/hooks/post-receive

with a post-receive hook like

#!/bin/sh
cd ../../beta
env -i git reset --hard
cd ../../release
env -i git reset --hard

Note:

the post-receive hook starts out with the GIT_DIR environment variable set to the repo/.git folder, so no matter what path you 'cd' into it will always try to run any following git commands there.
Fixing this is simply a matter of unsetting the GIT_DIR.

'env -i' does just that: it ignores the inherited environment completely and uses only the supplied variables and values.