Git, BitBucket and LocalServer

Hey Suleiman,

I've pinged a few of our dev teachers to see if they can help you out. :)

Thanks Nick, really appreciated :)

Hey Suleiman,

Git hooks are just shell scrips inside of your .git/hooks directory in your project. You should find sample files there that happen during the different parts of your project's life cycle. You may want to use the post-commit hook to accomplish this. You can find more information in the following git documentation:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/githooks.html

So, I'm not sure I fully understand. Is your local server separate from your development environment? Do you have git installed on your local and development servers?

Anyways, git does various hooks that can be run before and after things like commits, pushes, receiving pushes, etc.. These are basic shell scripts that could do anything. The issue is, since you're on Bitbucket (this applies as well to Github and other hosted git providers), you can't just write those scripts.

You could, if you have ssh access to your various servers, set up additional clones on those servers, and add them as remotes to your development repo.

git remote add localserver ssh://user@localserver:/path/to/repo

Then you could push to those servers directly

git push localserver master

Then you could have the various hooks (http://git-scm.com/book/en/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks) to copy files around as needed.

If you can't do that, the communicating from bitbucket/github to your servers is possible (as long as the servers are addressable) via POST hooks https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/POST+Service+Management

Basically this means bitbucket will send a post request when it receives a push, and the script in your server that handles it can update code as needed. Be careful with this method, if someone else finds the URL for it, they could trigger updates. It's not an ideal solution for me.

Ultimately, you are looking for a deployment solution, which git is not. Git helps and can be a basis for your deploy process, but it's still up to you. There are tools such as capistrano which may be more than you need. It's typically used for provisioning and deploying rails environments, but it can do basic file transfers. Older free railscast video or Newer railscast pro video

It's not a simple question to answer, because everybody's setup is different. Welcome to the exciting world of devops

Good responses!

Dagnamit, that is a bloody fine response. Thank you Jim!!

Jason, thank you I didn't know about that directory and it explains a great deal to me now. It seems there is a light at the end of this tunnel after all :)