There still are web hosting providers offering only ftp access to your website files. No fun if you’re used to version control systems and shell access.
I had to deal with that situation, and used Linux’s strength: combining several small tools.
I have a laptop running Ubuntu, a website in WordPress, git for version control, and use Eclipse as my development environment. I first looked at Aptana and other options for Eclipse, but I wanted a more light-weight solution that I could also use outside Eclipse.
Ubuntu comes with lftp, an ftp client that can be scripted and has a “mirror” command to basically get a target location synchronised to a source.
(It actually can do a lot more, and work over http or bittorrent too, but that’s outside the scope of this post.)
Not all files need to be uploaded. Typically, the.gitignore file already has a list of files and directories that are not under version control and wouldn’t go live when using git to update a server.
The lftp mirror command lets you exclude files and directories too, but curiously has no option to read a list of exclusions from a file. Martin Boze wrote how he fixed that, by using sed and tr.
I didn’t want to write a series of lftp commands, but instead would prefer to connect once, then run a series of transfers, inside a single script.
Specifically for WordPress, I also like to have a local mirror of images and documents uploaded on the live site.
It is possible use lftp as the shell to run a script, but unfortunately, it’s not possible to use environment variables or Martin’s “sed” trick in such scripts.
But it’s not to hard to do using the Heredoc syntax.
I use branches in git to separate my development version from a preview and a live version. By adapting the upload script in each branch, I can simply call “deploy” to upload the files to the right place.
#!/bin/bash
lftp <<EOF
user ftp-username ftp-password
open ftp.provider.com
# "mirror" from local copy to server, use .gitignore to excude files (sed, tr), delete remote files if needed
mirror -R -e -v -x \.git.+ -x scripts \`sed 's/^/-X /' .gitignore | tr '\n' ' '\` /var/www/dev_sites/website.org /www
# wordpress-specific
# "mirror" uploaded images on live back to local, don't delete local files if not on remote
mirror -v /www/wp-content/uploads/ /var/www/dev_sites/website.org/wp-content/uploads/
EOF
The only thing left to desire is a way to speed up ftp deployment…
