Setting up Git on EC2 to pull from GitHub repo

Question

I'm kind of new to both EC2 and Git, and I have just set up my first instance of EC2, using a clean Amazon Linux AMI. I also installed MySQL, Apache and PHP and opened some ports to make it work as a normal web server, responding to an elastic IP as well.

Now, my code is on a private repo on GitHub, and I would like to perform simple deployments by doing git pull or something like that. Git is also installed on the server already. I know I could set up my git repo on the server using my personal ssh key, but it seems odd. I guess another solution would be to create a new GitHub user and use it on the server, but it doesn't seem right either.

How do I achieve this in an elegant, safe way?

Answer 1

To avoid having to keep an SSH private key on your EC2 instance, people often use a workflow that involves pushing to that remote server in order to deploy. Essentially, you set up a bare git repository there with a pre-receive hook that deploys to another directory. There is a simple example of doing this in this tutorial. Then you only need to have your SSH public key in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the server. However, with this workflow, you couldn't deploy directly from your GitHub repository - you would need to pull it locally and then push to the EC2 machine.

An alternative is to use GitHub's deploy keys mechanism. This would involve creating a new SSH key-pair on your EC2 instance, and adding the public key as a deploy key into your private repository on GitHub. Then you can pull directly from your private GitHub repository to your EC2 instance.