Really Simple Staging preserving .data and .env

[danroot]

I am developing an application using glitch. I would like to be able to push it from a dev copy to a demo copy, and then to production manually. I understand I could probably export to github and build workflows and CI to do all this, or develop using an ide on my laptop. I also read a similar forum post where they landed on swapping out project names. But I like to stay in the web editor, and swapping project names ignores the .env and .data folders, which need to stay. What I really want is:

• develop foo-dev in the web-based glitch editor.
• open the web based terminal and run one command (or a shell script I write) to push all of the code, but NOT .env or .data to foo-demo or foo-prod.

I am able to get close if I:

• ensure .env and .data are in .gitignore
• from foo-dev terminal “git commit”
• from foo-demo terminal “git remote add dev https://path-to-foo-dev/git/foo-dev.git” once, then as-needed “git pull dev master --no-edit” and “refresh”

However, this requires me to touch both foo-dev and foo-demo each publish. I’d really like to push. When I try this:

• from foo-dev terminal “git remote add demo https://path-to-foo-test/git”
• from foo-dev terminal “git commit” and then “git push demo master -f”

I get an error “refusing to update checked out branch”.

Thanks to SO, I was able to get around this with git config receive.denyCurrentBranch updateInstead from the foo-demo terminal.

But when I do this, as best I can tell, foo-demo never gets updated. I’m sure there’s something I’m missing - I’m beyond my basic understanding of git here. But in the end: Is there some easy way to push code from one project to another, without involving github or laptop, taking care to not overwrite .data and .env?

[wh0]

the last step is probably to run refresh on foo-demo so that glitch relaunches the project with the new code. maybe you could do it with a git hook of some sort in foo-demo.

can you look up what git hooks the version of git on glitch supports?

[danroot]

Still needs some testing, but that pointed me in the right direction. I didn’t know about git hooks at all.

On the receiving project terminal, run:

git config receive.denyCurrentBranch updateInstead 
echo 'refresh' > ./.git/hooks/post-update
chmod +x ./.git/hooks/post-update

Then when it’s pushed into, the project refreshes. Exactly what I want - I just need to test some more to see if there are any gotchas.

[danroot]

After some more testing, this is working great. To recap for others (or me in the future), below is a summary of the solution:

Create multiple projects. We’ll call one foo-dev and the other foo-prod. Do these steps to set up publishing from foo-dev to foo-prod:

In foo-prod, open a terminal and run the following to tell git to update automatically on a push and add a “hook” to refresh glitch when a push is received:

git config receive.denyCurrentBranch updateInstead 
echo 'refresh' > ./.git/hooks/post-update
chmod +x ./.git/hooks/post-update

Then copy your git url (Tools → Import/Export)

Switch to foo-dev, edit your .gitignore file to ensure it contains .env and .data, node_modules, and any other files/folders you dont want published to production automatically.

Then, create a file publish-to-prod.sh and paste the following to create a script that will commit any pending changes and push them to a production remote:

git commit -a -m "Publishing Update"
git push prod master --force

In foo-dev, open a terminal and run the following to add the remote and make the script above executable:

git remote add prod <git url from foo-prod>
chmod +x ./publish-to-prod.sh

Now, whenever you make changes in foo-dev and are ready to publish, you can just run the following from terminal:

./publish-to-prod.sh

Of course, you’re not limited to dev and prod. You can also do similar for a demo environment, multiple production environments, etc. You could add in logic to run tests, notify, etc. I think this would be a cool feature for glitch to implement in the UI, but getting all this down to one command is pretty helpful.