Automatic GIT deployment via FTP, SFTP and SSH

Submitted by benjy on Thursday, June 21, 2012 - 07:35.

I've never really been happy with deploying websites via FTP clients such as Filezilla for obvious reasons.

Disadvantages of using an FTP client for deployment

  1. Its quite a primitive workflow manually browsing through the filesystem using Filezilla and individually uploading one file at a time.
  2. Alternatively re-uploading everything can be slow and cumbersome.
  3. It's not that easy to reverse changes on the web server
  4. You don't automatically know what revision of the code has been deployed to the server.

Here comes Springloops. Springloops is a remote repository and deployment server. Well that's mainly what I use it for, they also offer a number of project management and wiki tools.

Advantages of using Springloops for deployment

  1. One click deployment. Once you have pushed all your code out through your VCS to Springloops deployment is as easy as one click.
  2. Revert deployments. Need to undo that deployment and revert to a previous commit? No problems that's one click too.
  3. Fast. Worried about it being slow? Springloops only deploys changes to files.
  4. Staged commits. Already have a code base on the live server? Not a problem, simply specify the commit already on the server and Springloops will deploy all changes since that commit.
  5. Notifications. Need to know if the deployment failed? Easy create a notification for different events such as failed deployments.

If you have any questions regarding Springloops please feel free to ask them in the comments and I'll answer them where I can. You could also use this link and get a free 28 day trial.  

Deployment
Git
SSH Keys and Springloops on OSX

Comments

I've also written a little PHP script that that does deployments through FTP locally from your computer. It si called PHPloy and is tightly-coupled with Git to determine what which files where edited/added/deleted and uploads them accordingly. You put your FTP details in a deploy.ini file and run just a command to deploy:

phploy

You can also deploy to multiple servers at once. And if you have multiple servers configured, you can select to deploy to one of them like this:

phploy --server staging

There is more that can be done - check it out on Github: https://github.com/banago/PHPloy

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