I’m trying to get a fairly simple deploy process going for a Node app using Gitolite. I have Gitolite setup and working on my server, and I’m able to push to it fine.
Gitolite is running under a user called git, and I’ve setup a node user that I’m hoping to use to run the Node app.
My plan is to push the Node app to Gitolite, and then use a post-receive hook script to move the app files to the directory where the app lives, in this case /var/local/node-apps/my-node-app/. I created the Node app folder like this:
sudo mkdir -p /var/local/node-apps/my-node-app
sudo chown node /var/local/node-apps/my-node-app
The problem is that I’m a Unix noob and I haven’t got my head round file/folder permissions and wotnot.
/var/local/node-apps (and also /var/local/node-apps/my-node-app) is owned by the node user, so when the git user tries to checkout to this location I get a bunch of permission denied errors. The command I’m using in the post-receive is:
GIT_WORK_TREE=/var/local/node-apps/my-node-app git checkout -f
And I get errors like this:
remote: error: git checkout-index: unable to create file XXXX (Permission denied)
remote: fatal: cannot create directory at 'XXXX': Permission denied
What’s the best way to resolve this? Do I need to grant the git user password-less sudo rights to su as the node user? Or can this be somehow fixed by changing groups and folder permissions? Or a different approach entirely? I’m lost!
Thanks!
Using sudo would certainly work, you have one example at “post-receive hook permission denied “unable to create file” error“, wrapping the git commands in a script.
The other approach would be a cron job as
nodeuser regularly fetching and (if there are new commit) pulling in the destination repo.