The problem

I’m using jekyll to write my company’s website (in addition to this blog). I’m using git to manage the content revisions, naturally, but since it’s a private repository, I’m not using github pages to keep the website and the site content in the repo synchronised.

The website itself is hosted on rented server space that I have ssh access to, but is not the same server that hosts the git repository, or the development machines (obviously).

I could follow one of the ideas presented in the jekyll website, but I found most of them to be, well meh., especially since I don’t want to recreate the entire Git repository on the web server – I just want the static Jekyll output put there, and kept in sync.

So I rolled my own.

My solution

The solution is actually just two simple scripts.

Development side script

On my development machine, I have a script that does the following:

1. runs grunt prod to produce the production version of the site ¹
2. runs jekyll build to produce the website code (in _site)
3. Compresses and secure copies the tarballed site to an ‘incoming’ folder on the web server.
   • There are some steps to make this automatic, like setting up SSH keypairs between the dev machine and the webserver. The steps for doing this can be found elsewhere.

Pretty simple, yeah? The script is essentially this:

#!/bin/bash
grunt prod
jekyll build
tar -czf my_website.tar.gz _site/*
scp my_website.tar.gz mywebserver.com:~/incoming/

Server side script

Ok, now on the server, I want it to automatically respond when a new version of the site is uploaded, and update the website source with the new version.

For good measure, it will email me when it’s done.

I’m not covering how to set up the web server here. I’ll assume that the live content is being served out of /var/www/my_site and that the ‘incoming’ folder is in a user home folder. This user will also need to be in the sudoers list to carry out the admin tasks we’ll set up. For security reasons, the live code is owned by the webserver user, www-data.

In summary

Location	Folder	Owner	Permissions
Live site	/var/www-data	www-data	664
incoming updates folder	/home/cayle/incoming	cayle	660

There are a couple of things that need to happen here:

1. The system must watch for changes in the incoming folder
2. A script must them launch that does the following:
   • extract the tarball over the old code
   • changes the ownership of the new code to www-data
   • Mails me when it’s done

The first step is achieved by using incron.

1. Install incron (sudo apt-get install incron)

2. Add a line along the lines of this to /etc/incron.d/my_website:

   /home/cayle/incoming IN_CLOSE_WRITE /home/cayle/update_site.sh $#

The /home/cayle/update_site.sh is the last piece of the puzzle and is pretty straightforward:

#!/bin/bash
echo `date` >> update_site.log
echo "Detected change in $1" >> update_site.log
# This file gets called automatically by incron when files in this folder are modified
if [ x$1 == xmy_website.tar.gz ]; then
  echo "Extracting archive...">> update_site.log
  tar -xzvf /home/cayle/incoming/my_website.tar.gz -C /var/www/my_site >> update_site.log
  echo "Changing ownership..." >> update_site.log

  chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/my_site/* >> update_site.log

  echo "Done." >> update_site.log

  echo "My website has been updated" | mail -r support@nmywebserver.com -s "Website updated" myemail@address.here >> update_site.log

fi

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