Deploy an app on a remote server with git [closed]

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Is it a good practice to deploy a web app on a cloud server using git ? that means cloning the repo from github or bitbucket and then running it. Are there better ways to do so ? e.g:launching an FTP Server?

Answer 1

It can be a potential security risk to use a Git workspace as the website directory. Because a Git workspace (the "work tree") contains the .git directory, and if you make a configuration mistake, or the website gets hacked, the .git directory might get exposed or leaked.

A safer way is to separate the Git repository and the working tree, for example like this:

git clone your_remote_repo_url /path/to/repo
mkdir /path/to/deployment
cd /path/to/repo
git checkout --work-tree /path/to/deployment -f

In this setup, /path/to/deployment is a regular directory, without a .git folder. The risk of the .git folder ever getting exposed is smaller this way. You can still perform Git operations on the deployment directory using the --work-tree flag as in the checkout example above.

I do this way only on production sites, on DEV sites I use regular clones.