Easiest Git Deploy Ever!

The following tutorial shows the easiest way I’ve found to deploy pretty much any application to another machine!

Server Prerequisites:

$ git pull the app from the server
$ ssh user@server get into the server
☑ pm2 or apache2 or nginx … some kind of server is running

Server Side

Create the following file in the home directory of the server… it’s just 3 lines.

$nano ~/update_server.sh
cd ~/nodeApp;
git pull;
pm2 restart app;

This assumes the node app is already running using pm2 and is named app in the pm2 process, but any other server can be restarted too

Local Side

Once you’ve committed and pushed some changes to the git repository, you can can call this script using a command sent through ssh.

$ ssh -T root@yourserver ./update_server.sh

ssh -T lets you run a single command through the ssh tunnel, in this case we’re executing the script update_server.sh

That’s it! Your server pulls the latest changes and restarts!!

If you know of an easier solution please let me know in the comments.