I put my personal nanoc boilerplate setup on GitHub. Maybe you find the deployment process useful.

Deployment Process

I assume you’re public html folder is called htdocs/ and you can create new folders below your domains folder but outside htdocs/.

I also assume you use my Rakefile: upon rake build it will checkout the branch ‘deploy’ and put all files from output/ in there. Uploading from ‘deploy’ to the production server will only copy the HTML output, not the nanoc setup.

1. Initialize bare production git repository on the server:

   git init --bare ~/doms/example.com/git

2. You’ll want automatic updates when you push to the server. Use git’s own post-receive hook:

   # add to ~/doms/example.com/git/hooks/post-receive
   echo "Updating website ..."
   cd /the/full/path/to/doms/example.com/htdocs || exit
   unset GIT_DIR
   git pull origin 
   echo "Update complete."

   Make it executable:

   chmod +x post-receive

3. Initialize git repository in htdocs/. This will point to the bare repository on the server and check out the current version:

   # given you're in ~/doms/example.com/htdocs
   git init
   git remote add origin ../git
   
   # setup branch to pull from:
   git config branch.master.remote origin
   git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/deploy

4. Setup production server locally:

   git remote add production ssh://user@example.com/~/doms/example.com/git/
   git remote show production

5. Commit changes locally and put them on the server:

   git commit
   rake build
   git push production deploy

   You can push all branches via git push production to backup your code. Only the branch ‘deploy’ will be visible to the public.

Sources

I once combed this together from various sources:

• dead simple git deployment
• Using Git and a post-receive hook script for auto deployment
• Deploy websites using Git - the easy way
• Using Git for Deployment