How I setup git for my WordPress installation in BlueHost

Im not sure if this is the “proper” way to do it. Well, it sort of works for me at the moment so I thought I’ll share it here. I did use FTP at first (using FileZilla) but I didnt really like the workflow.

• Host: BlueHost shared account
• Client: Windows 10

Prerequisites

• SSH/Shell Access should be enabled. I enabled this from my cPanel -> SSH/Shell Access menu.

Server/Host side

• SSH to BlueHost host. By default, my website was installed inside ~/public_html folder. I created a new folder named ~/www-checkout. This will be my new “live” website.
• I copied everything from ~/public_html to ~/www-checkout.

cp -rv ~/public_html/ ~/www-checkout/

• I renamed my ~/public_html to ~/public_html_original. Just for backup.

mv ~/public_html ~/public_html_original

• Then I created a symbolic link named ~/public_html that points to ~/www-checkout.

ln -s ~/www-checkout ~/public_html

• Then I created my main git repository folder named ~/www.git.

mkdir www.git
cd www.git
git --bare init

• Then I added a post-receive script inside hooks folder that will do a checkout to ~/www-checkout every time the repository is updated.

cd hooks
touch post-receive
chmod 755 post-receive

Contents of post-receive (edited using vim)

#!/bin/sh
GIT_WORK_TREE=~/www-checkout git checkout -f

• Then I created a new “work” folder named ~/www-work for my initial commit, cloned the still empty git repository, then copied the contents of ~/www-checkout.

cd && mkdir www-work
cd www-work
git clone ~/www.git

• Before the commit, I deleted the files that I thought should not be included in the source.
  • wp-content/plugins
  • wp-content/upgrade
  • wp-content/uploads
• (Optional) Edit source files.
• Commit source files.

git add --all
git commit -a -m "Initial commit."
git push -u origin master

Thats it. Now to the client side.

Client side

• I installed Git for Windows from here.
• The I created a working folder, right-click -> Git Bash Here menu (I checked the context menu during installation, which by default, was already checked anyway).
• Clone the repository.

git clone <username>@<domain>:~/www.git

I now have a working source copy in my Windows client machine!

Disadvantages?

One thing I can think of is that every edit goes directly to live folder. So I dont have a sort of “staging” server for me to test before putting changes to live. Both a blessing and a curse, I think. But then again, this is just a simple blog, using a free theme, so I dont think I will be doing any massive changes to the source code anyway.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.