Question

I am trying to create a post-receive hook in Nodejs to update my server when my Github repo has been updated.

I have done this before in php. I am now using Nodejs and am unsure how it should be acheived.

I have looked at this blog post about setting up nodejs on an ec2 instance. It says:

Create a post-recieve hook that will copy over new code after it’s been pushed to the repository

$ cat > hooks/post-receive

#!/bin/sh
GIT_WORK_TREE=/home/ubuntu/www
export GIT_WORK_TREE
git checkout -f

$ chmod +x hooks/post-receive

I am unsure what exactly the above code is doing and how it should be implemented.

Any ideas on the best way of doing this?

I am running a basic 32-bit Amazon Linux EC2 instance.

Answer 1

A git bare repository doesn’t include the working tree. So to use the files you have to check them out.

putting the above script in (pseudo path) ec2:mybaregitrepo/hooks/post-recieve will cause it to run every time you push to ec2.

Which means:

#!/bin/sh
//set git working tree (the files you can use) to the path /home/ubuntu/www
GIT_WORK_TREE=/home/ubuntu/www
export GIT_WORK_TREE
//force git checkout so that your files will be put into the working tree.
git checkout -f

than:

//make the post-recieve hook executable so that it can run when you push commits to ec2
chmod +x hooks/post-receive

here is a decent runthrough of setting up a remote bare git repo
http://toroid.org/ams/git-website-howto