Pushing jekyll blog content to Dreamhost using GIT
How to use dreamhost as if it was heroku or netlify, auto building the site with jekyll with a simple script and some elbow grease.
Keeping the blog versioned
Initially I forked a theme and started tweaking it. Since with static content blogs you don’t need a database I created a git repo to store jekyll’s folder structure and assets. Also I added a remote private repo in bitbucket (I don’t want anybody to see _config.yml for example).
The initial workflow
The initial workflow was to generate the static content, open a ftp connection and upload the contents of the _site folder. That was OK but since I spend most of my time on the console, having the possibility to push updates to my blog using GIT sounded like a good idea. The question was if that was actually possible with Dreamhost.
A google search found this gist Automatic Git deploys on Dreamhost which was the starting point for this post.
Dreamhost passwordless login
In order to push code to a repo located at Dreamhost we need to be able to login without password. To do so we are going to generate a public SSH key on our machine if we don’t have one:
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa
Answer yes to all questions and that will create a id_rsa.pub file under your ~/.ssh directory. Now we need to upload that file to Dreamhost. That can be accomplished using FTP or using:
$ ssh-copy-id <user>@<host>
In OS X Mavericks I didn’t had that command, so I installed it with homebrew:
$ brew install ssh-copy-id
We should be able to connect to Dreamhost without password now.
Remote repo creation
Now we need to create a repo in Dreamhost in order to push the code:
$ ssh <user>@<host>
$ cd ~
$ mkdir <mydomain_com>.git
$ cd <mydomain_com>.git
$ git init --bare
Setting up the post-receive hook
After we initialize the bare repo we need to set up a post-receive hook, that will be triggered every time changes are pushed. The thing here changes a little from the gist I found. Since Jekyll’s default build folder is _site and I want to keep all in one repo I added some extra steps to the hook. The other way to do this would be keeping a simple hook but pointing Jekyll’s build to other folder, if that works for you is not very different than this.
We need to connect to the server again and create a post-receive hook using vi (or the editor you like):
$ ssh <user>@<host>
$ cd ~
$ vi <mydomain_com>.git/hooks/post-receive
Then paste this code:
#!/bin/bash
# Replace this line with your real domain name
DOMAIN=mydomain.com
echo
echo "~~ Updating $DOMAIN ~~"
echo
# Clearing git env
unset GIT_DIR
unset GIT_WORK_TREE
# auxiliar domain storing the entire jekyll tree (all repo content)
cd ~/$DOMAIN-jekyll
git pull
# get to the static build directory
cd _site
# delete domain contents
rm -rf ~/$DOMAIN/*
# copy that to our real domain path
cp -R * ~/$DOMAIN
echo
echo "~~ Done ~~"
echo
Also we need to make this script executable:
$ chmod +x <mydomain_com>.git/hooks/post-receive
Creating the remote structure
Now we need to create a remote structure. In Dreamhost, we clone the repo we just created:
$ cd ..
$ git clone <mydomain_com>.git <mydomain.com>-jekyll
The flow is:
Once the changes are pushed, the entire Jekyll folder structure will be sitting on a directory
Adding the remote endpoint to our local repository and pushing changes
In our machine we need to add the remote to our local repository.
$ git remote add live ssh://<user>@<host>/~/<mydomain_com>.git
And that’s it.
We will now be able to push changes straight to our Dreamhost domain with:
$ git push live master
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