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Total newbie question but what is the best practice when it comes to using SSH with Git? I'm working on a WordPress project. In the root I have gulp and other dev files/folders like SASS and Scripts that I don't need on the server and in the same project I have my WordPress folder that contains a theme and a few custom plugins. As you can imagine when the theme or any of the plugins are ready to be deployed I don't want to pull everything in my repository on the server. So far as a newbie I've always just pull and pushed the entire repository and used FTP to upload what I need to the server, so how is this done with SSH and Git and is there a better way to have my setup?
EDIT: To make my question a little bit more clear let me give you an example of what I think my issue is. In my main project folder, I have a SASS folder next to my WordPress folder. All I really need to deploy to the server is the WordPress folder. My build process that happens on my dev machine combines all of the SASS files into a single CSS that is then placed into the WordPress folder. I need the SASS folder to be tracked by Git so that any other developer can pull them and continue developing so I can't have git ignore it. However none of those SASS files need to be on the server for WordPress to work either. I just simply need to deploy the WordPress folder and everything that's in it.
I understand the idea of creating a bare repository on the server and using post-receive hook to point the git folder sitting outside your web root to point to where the web root is. But that's basically how GIT and SSH work and that's not answering my concern.
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Just to add on this, the reason why you cannot pull just a directory is because git uses data semantic tracking, not file semantic tracking, so you can seamlessly move code (or other data) in and out of files without having to tell the source tracking system (until you update of course.)
To clone git repository into a specific folder, you can use -C <path> parameter, e.g. Although it'll still create a whatever folder on top of it, so to clone the content of the repository into current directory, use the following syntax: cd /httpdocs git clone [email protected]:whatever .
Use the terminal to display the . git directory with the command ls -a . The ls command lists the current directory contents and by default will not show hidden files.
Git is for source control, not for deployment. There is no best practice for using git this way because git is not a deployment tool. You also don't need git history on your server. In fact, you don't need git at all unless you insist on using it for deployment. You are welcome to use it this way but it's not ideal because of exactly the kind of problem you're asking about.
There are a number of tools you could use to handle your deployments. Most of the tools generally let you set up a series of steps that let you deploy the code you want into the environment you want. You could go with simple tools such as Phing or Deployer in the PHP world, or something more sophisticated like Puppet or Chef if you have more complex needs. You could just write your own bash scripts if what you need is really very simple. I recommend Phing or Deployer given the info you've provided. https://deployer.org/ https://www.phing.info/
You'll just configure whichever tool you want to ssh into your target box and copy over only the files you want into the directory you want on the server, in whatever way you would like to do that. Usually, you have the script copy files into a temp dir, tarball them up, ssh them over and untar them. After that, you'll usually do some additional work on the server to move files around, change symlinks, whatever else you might need to do.
All you need to do is add steps to the handle the static files and where you want them to go. Include the generated static files in your tarball when you push stuff up, and put them in the right directories in the server once you untar it.
When you configured your SASS compiler, and whatever other pre-compiled static code you may have - you configured it to create a destination file. That is, the file(s) of actual CSS and JS that they generate. That's all you need to bring along - and if you have the destination directory set to be inside your wordpress theme, you may not even have to pay all that much special attention to it's handling. You may need to move them somewhere else once they are on the server but that all depends on the specific setup in your server, which I think is outside the scope of this question.
You didn't ask about this but I thought it was worth mentioning, that you shouldn't be sending the entire wordpress repository every time you update. Just like you don't need the uncompiled SASS code, you also don't need to be repackaging core WordPress. You don't even need to be commiting core WordPress, its a dependency and you don't need to be changing it.
All that should be getting committed by you is your theme and plugin code, and the uncompiled static files. Compiled static files and external dependencies like the WordPress core don't belong in your git history. For deployment purposes, WordPress should already be installed. The stuff in your tarballs should just be plugins and themes, and additional static files if they aren't already in there for some reason.
Don't use git for this. Use a tool like Phing or Deployer. Build your static files into your theme, and create phing/deployer scripts that tarball up only the code you want, SSH's it over to your server, and untars it into the directories you want. If you have some special location on the server for your static files, just make sure to add steps in your script for that.
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Git is not designed to pull specific files or directories only. It's a directed acyclic graph with binary blobs as objects and sometimes multiple objects get compacted into a single larger object.
Due to Git design, your specific request is not possible.
If your website only contains simple static files then it's okay to push to a git repository over SSH. In reality, it's unlikely your repository will be large as long as you don't have non-text files.
Take for example the following setup.
/var/lib/www - apache web dir which is the cloned copy of www.git
/var/lib/www.git - a bare git repository./var/lib/www.git/hooks/post-recieve - A server side git hook. It can be a shell script that pulls the www repository when this repository is updated.Sample post-recieve hook script:
#!/bin/bash
cd /home/sam/sandbox/git-hooks/www
unset GIT_DIR
git fetch origin master
git reset --hard origin/master
At the end of your build you can zip up your files in a tar.gz. This file should be hosted somewhere (perhaps GitHub releases if you're using GitHub). Some enterprises use on premise artifact hosting like Nexus or Artifactory.
The idea being: you have a tested artifact that has a specific sha256sum. The artifact you test is the exact same artifact which eventually goes to production.
Diving into more detail such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, and the software development life cycle might be out of scope for your question.
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