Getting Github Files (And Updates) Onto an Ubuntu Web Server

Getting GitHub files (and updates) onto an Ubuntu web server

How do most people get GitHub files to their web servers?

Generally by pushing to a bare repo on the web server, with a post-receive hook ready to checkout that repo on the site working tree, similar to:

git --git-dir=/path/to/bare_repo.git --work-tree=/path/to/website/httpdocs checkout -f

You can also pull from the bare repo itself, through a cron job for instance:

*/10 * * * * user /home/usern/git-pull-requests/fetch.sh

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But pull or push mean that git is installed on the server.

If you don't want that, you can use git archive to create an archive (zip or tar), and copy over that for a custom script to uncompress it.

What is the best way to update website code on a ubuntu 20.04 server?

Yes, there are better ways to do it! What you're describing is generally known as Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment, or CI/CD. CI/CD is an area of developer operations (devops) that includes tools and techniques used to automate the build, testing, and deployment of an application. You have several options, depending on how robust this solution needs to be. Here are a few:

1. You could use Github Actions to automate something very similar to what you do right now. Instead of running the commands manually, you would script them to run in a Docker container hosted on Github. You could configure the action to run when you tag a commit, or commit on a specific branch. This would remove the tedium of running the commands manually, but wouldn't eliminate downtime during the deployment process. Github's free plan includes 2,000 automation minutes per month, which sounds like it would be more than adequate for your needs. Of course it could be used to do far more than this simple scenario, too.

2. AWS CodePipeline is AWS's CI/CD service. Similar to GitHub actions, it can be used to orchestrate a complex sequence of actions to build, test, and deploy applications. AWS allows one active pipeline on its free tier. There's probably not a compelling difference between Github Actions and CodePipeline for your use case, so you may want to read the getting started documents and pick the one that appeals to you more.

3. Instead of using a single EC2 instance, you could create your application in an Elastic Beanstalk environment. Elastic Beanstalk is a service that simplifies deployment of common application patterns. EB includes load balancing, autoscaling, and managing deployments across multiple EC2 instances. This would enable you to deploy with no downtime, as the EB environment will manage the deployments and take instances out of service as they're being updated, while leaving the other instances in service. Using EB would probably incur additional cost over what you're doing now, and you may find it limiting for use cases that diverge from the application patterns it supports. But for a simple nodejs app deployed on a couple of web servers, this would work just fine.

There are lots of other options, but I think one of the above would serve as an excellent introduction to CI/CD in AWS.

Refresh repo on a ubuntu server when master branch on GitHub is updated. How can I do this?

To achieve this, I've used Jenkins. Jenkins is a large tool with lots of functions, one function let Jenkins listen on Webhooks send out by GitHub when the master (or any other branch) changes. Then it will auto pull.

This workflow is awesome!

How to update my server files from a git repo automatically everyday

If you have cronjobs you can use them. First set up the repository on your server. Then you can set up the cronjob, choose a time in which it should be executed, and then in the cronjob execute the following command:

cd your/repository/folder; git pull master origin

How to update my server files from a git repo automatically everyday

If you have cronjobs you can use them. First set up the repository on your server. Then you can set up the cronjob, choose a time in which it should be executed, and then in the cronjob execute the following command:

cd your/repository/folder; git pull master origin

Updating a local repository with changes from a GitHub repository

Probably:

was: git pull origin master

now: git pull origin main

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