Setting up Git on EC2 to pull from GitHub repo

Question

I'm kind of new to both EC2 and Git, and I have just set up my first instance of EC2, using a clean Amazon Linux AMI. I also installed MySQL, Apache and PHP and opened some ports to make it work as a normal web server, responding to an elastic IP as well.

Now, my code is on a private repo on GitHub, and I would like to perform simple deployments by doing git pull or something like that. Git is also installed on the server already. I know I could set up my git repo on the server using my personal ssh key, but it seems odd. I guess another solution would be to create a new GitHub user and use it on the server, but it doesn't seem right either.

How do I achieve this in an elegant, safe way?

Answer 1

One of the ways, that I find to be most convenient, for implementing what you are trying to achieve is to create a bare git repository in your remote server where you can push from git. 

Following is how you can do it:

Make sure that you can SSH into your instance without having to type a password, that is. your public key is saved in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys 

Step 1. Creating a repository on the server to mirror a repository that you would have on a local server.

$ mkdir web.git && cd web.git

$ git init --bare

Initialized empty Git repository in /home/ams/website.git/

Step 2: Define a post-receive hook

$ mkdir /var/www/www.example.org

$ cat > hooks/post-receive

#!/bin/sh

GIT_WORK_TREE=/var/www/www.example.org git checkout -f

$ chmod +x hooks/post-receive

Step 3: On the workstation, defining a name for the remote server and then creating a new master branch there.

$ git remote add web ssh://server.example.org/home/ams/website.git

$ git push web +master:refs/heads/master

On the remote server, there should be a copy of your files in /var/www/www.example.org