Editing One Quick Way To Host A WebApp (section)

=== Hosting Your Code ===

You can build your app and only deploy the artifacts, but I've found it much easier to just push the source code and build the app on the production host. The way I do this is perhaps unorthodox or perhaps standard.

First, create your app directory:

    mkdir ~/sub.roshangeorge.dev

Then make it into a git repo:

    cd ~/sub.roshangeorge.dev
    git init .

Then on your dev machine, add it as a remote:

    git remote add deploy user@host:~/sub.roshangeorge.dev
    git push deploy main

Now, this would seem to be enough, but you can't push to a branch that is checked out. So what I do is that I only ever have 'releases' checked out. And a release is just a tag. So on my local machine, I might do.

    git tag release-20250313
    git push deploy --tags

And then on the host I check out the relevant tag when I want to run that:

    git checkout release-20250313

This little trick lets me just `git push` when I want to deploy. If you like, you can put in post-commit hooks and all that, but I haven't found them useful. I just ssh on and build.