git clone from local to remote

Question

We're in the process of migrating from Mercurial to Git for our workflow and I have two minor issues.

First, is it possible to "clone" a local repository directly into an empty remote (ssh) dir?

Currently when we create a new website we basically clone our CMS locally, configure it and then we clone it on the central repo and on the webserver (hg clone . ssh://account@server/www). That way we have instant access to push/pull goodness.

This brings me to the second issue, remote deployment.

Currently with Mercurial, I have a simple hooks in the remote repos that execute hg up when a changeset is received.

To do the same with Git I've followed the instructions here: http://caiustheory.com/automatically-deploying-website-from-remote-git-repository but I'd like to keep the .git directory in the website root as it is the case with Mercurial (it's protected by Apache config and I can't export GIT_DIR for all accounts as some have more than one website/repos).

Is it possible to have basically the same setup without separating the working dir from the repos?

Answer 1

To answer your first question, yes, you can. Suppose the remote directory is ssh://user@host/home/user/repo. This must be a git repository, create that with git init --bare or scp your local repo.git (can be created with git clone) directory to remote. Then do:

git remote add origin ssh://user@host/home/user/repo
git push --all origin

This will push all locally-existing branches to the remote repository.

To get to your next question, you should be able to do the same thing by using a different set of commands. Try these:

$ cd /var/www  # or wherever
$ mkdir somesite
$ cd somesite/
$ git init
$ git --bare update-server-info
$ git config receive.denycurrentbranch ignore
$ cat > hooks/post-receive
#!/bin/sh
git checkout -f
^D
$ chmod +x hooks/post-receive

You would, of course, run the remote/push commands above after this step. You may have to check out a specific branch after doing so, so that the "somesite" clone on the server actually knows which branch to follow. From then on out, pushing to that repository should trigger a re-checkout of that branch.