Deploy Wordpress using Git

A few weeks ago I came into the joy of setting up one or another Wordpress Blog. Copying files around after every change felt so 90ies and also introduced a lot of errors while working on the blog itself.

Being a huge fan of git I found a nice way to deploy any Wordpress blog and any static website using git. First of all you need a server with SSH access and some rights on that machine.

The local part

First we create a Git repository in your Wordpress/Website folder.

    cd wordpress_blog
    git init
    git add .
    git commit -m 'Initial commit'

The remote part

Create bare repository to mirror your local Wordpress source.

    mkdir blog.git && cd blog.git
    git init --bare

Keep this repository separated from any the webroot and do not make it accessible to the outside world in any way.

Now we need to create the directory where the blog should be deployed to

    mkdir /srv/www/blog/

and add the post-receive hook by adding the following to the blog.git/hooks/post-receive file and making it executable chmod +x blog.git/hooks/post-receive.

sh post-receive hook #!/bin/sh GIT_WORK_TREE=/srv/www/blog git checkout -f

The deployment part

Now we need to add the new remote we just created to your repository and push our source code.

    git remote add blog ssh://blog.example.com/home/USER/blog.git
    git push blog +master:refs/heads/master

To deploy your changes now you need to commit them and then push to your remote. bash git push blog

After a successfully running the last command your changes should be in /srv/www/blog/.