Git - deploy dist folder to different remote

Question

I'm trying to figure out a way to deploy a dist folder to a different remote repo using Git.

The working project is stored in an app folder. I use grunt to optimize and compile the working project into a dist folder. I want to know if there is a way I can than use git to push only the dist folder to a different remote than the origin that the rest of the project uses.

Obviously, I just need the dist folder to go live. Not the whole project.

I tried looking into Git Subtree - but I'm not sure that I'm understanding the concept or if I can use it to accomplish what I'm trying to do.

Any advice would be extremely helpful!

Thanks in advance!

Rich

Answer 1

You can:

• make dist as an independent repo within your current repo.
• declare dist as a submodule: see Git Submodules.

• set a remote within the dist repo referencing your production server.

  git remote add prod /url/to/your/prod/server
  

• push from that submodule

  cd dist
  git push prod master
  

That supposes you have, on your server:

• setup a bare repo dist.git
• put an post-receive hook which will, on receiving the push, go to the actual dist folder, and checkout the content of what you just pushed.
  See an example at "how do I deploy multiple branches to different directories via git push?"

Answer 2

If dist is also being revisioned by your repository you can also use subtree for your needs.

Assuming you already have a remote repository setup in your local repository, after you have committed your changes to dist the command for a subtree push would be:

git subtree push --prefix dist distRemote remoteBranch

What this command is doing is first creating a new set of commits in which dist is the root folder and only changes to dist appear. This commit is then pushed to the remoteBranch in the distRemote repository.