Git Auto Deploy

Automatically deploy latest git repository branch via PHP

This tutorial is based on a ServerPilot installation on an Ubuntu based VPS provided by DigitalOcean. Other configurations will work with minor modification to the below script.

Configuration

1. Create an app in ServerPilot.

2. SSH into your server using a system user. serverpilot

3. cd into ~\.ssh

4. Run ssh-keygen. (Don't assign a password) (You only need a single key for your account on the server)

5. Add the key to your GitHub account SSH Keys (Settings > SSH and GPG Keys > New SSH Key).

6. cd into your apps root directory. (Not public)

7. Run git clone --mirror git@github.com:USERNAME/REPONAME.git repo. (Clones your repo into a repo folder)

8. Run an initial deploy from CLI

cd repo
GIT_WORK_TREE=/srv/users/serverpilot/apps/APPNAME/public git checkout -f master

8. Create a PHP file for GitHub to run when the master branch is altered. (~/apps/APPNAME/public/deploy.php)

<?php
	$repo_dir = "/srv/users/serverpilot/apps/APPNAME/repo";
	$public_dir = "/srv/users/serverpilot/apps/APPNAME/public";
	$secret = "SECRET";
	if ($_GET["secret"] != $secret) {
		header("HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized");
		exit();
	}
	exec("cd " . $repo_dir . " && git fetch");
	exec("cd " . $repo_dir . " && GIT_WORK_TREE=" . $public_dir . " git checkout -f");
	$commit_hash = shell_exec("cd " . $repo_dir . " && git rev-parse --short HEAD");
	file_put_contents("deploy.log", "[" . date("Y-m-d H:i:s") . "] INFO Deployed commit: " . $commit_hash, FILE_APPEND);
?>

9. Add the POST hook within GitHub.

http://DOMAIN.TLD/deploy.php?secret=1234567890

10. Make changes via Git, then commit them to the "master" branch, and push.

11. The files were now deployed to ~/apps/APPNAME/public as intended.

• For additional security, change the name of deploy.php to something containing random characters, such as deploy-23d98th98y.php. If you do that, don't forget to update the URL you configured in GitHub.

For debugging, the script in that blog post creates a log file at ~/apps/APPNAME/public/deploy.log. You can also check your app's nginx logs if you aren't sure GitHub made the request.