git-hostgator.md

Overview

FTP blows and you want to simply git push hostgator master out to your desired directory. It's pretty easy.

Assumptions

• You've gotten Hostgator to authorize you to use SSH
• The server has git
• You know that Hostgator uses port 2222 for SSH

Step 1: Put your public key on the server

Go ahead and SSH into the box:

ssh USER_NAME@your-domain.com -p 2222
...
Enter your password: *****

Copy your public key from your machine. It's typically found in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. Open that file in Sublime (or something) and copy it. Then, on the Hostgator server, paste it in the following file: ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. It's possible that the authorize_keys file may not exist. If that's the case just touch authorized_keys in that directory to create it.

Step 2: Initialize a repo and configure it

cd into your directory. An example might be /www/your-domain.com. Initialize the repo with:

git init

After that, configure the repo to accept pushed into this working directory. Save the following in a file at: PATH_TO_REPO/.git/hooks/post-receive

GIT_WORK_TREE=../ git checkout -f

Then make it executable with:

chmod +x PATH_TO_REPO/.git/hooks/post-receive

Step 3: Setup your SSH config locally

Let's make it simple to connect to hostgator via SSH. Open ~/.ssh/config on your local machine and add an entry to it.

Host hostgator
    User USER_NAME
    HostName YOUR_DOMAIN
    Port 2222
    PreferredAuthentications publickey

Now, you can simply ssh hostgator and get a connection.

Step 4: Setup Hostgator as a git remote

On your local machine, navigate to your repo and run the following command:

git remote add hostgator ssh://user-name@your-domain.com:2222/full/path/public_html/your-domain.com

I had to add the full path to get everything to work properly. You can find the full path in your control panel.

Step 5: git push

Now you can simply:

git push hostgator master

Done.