Using GIT to deploy website

Question

I have followed this excellent write up http://toroid.org/ams/git-website-howto to deploy code to my server using Git's post-hooks strategy.

I have a post-update file that looks like this:

GIT_WORK_TREE=/home/rajat/webapps/<project name> git checkout -f

Everytime I push code to master branch, it gets auto deployed. What I want to do now is to make this support multiple branches, so that:

1. git push origin master -----> deploys code to production (/home/rajat/webapps/production)
2. git push origin staging ----> deploys code to staging (/home/rajat/webapps/staging)
3. git push origin test ----> deploys code to test (/home/rajat/webapps/test)

For this, the post-update hook needs to understand which branch got updated. Is this possible ?

Answer 1

It is possible to write a post-update hook which detect the branch name.
See for inspiration:

• "Writing a git post-receive hook to deal with a specific branch"
• "Find Git branch name in post-update hook"

As an example (all those hooks are based on git rev-parse):

#!/bin/bash
while read oldrev newrev refname
do
    branch=$(git rev-parse --symbolic --abbrev-ref $refname)
    if [ "master" == "$branch" ]; then
        # Do something
    fi
done

Answer 2

What I usually do is add two bare git repos in different locations on my web server; one for test, one for production. Both repos have post-hooks to checkout to the correct directory. Then I add both as remotes on my (single) local repo.

Using this method I can push any branch to my test remote or my production remote at any time. Not sure if this is the right way but it's worked well for me.