One of the requests for the new Jeremy Day site was to have her LiveJournal copied to the front page. My first thought was to use jQuery’s wrapper around XMLHttpRequest to pull in the Atom feed and process that with XSLT—but I had forgotten the ban on cross-site requests. I decided the correct solution was to get my own proper server at last, so I could host a cached copy of the LiveJournal page there. (I have since been told that it is possible to instead use some gadget from Yahoo.)
I am using Git
The new site is implemented in Django, so I can build and test the site easily on my iMac at home. Once it is working I need to copy the files to my server, as efficiently, securely and automatically as possible. I know young people like to drag and drop files with FileZilla, but I prefer to just type a command in to the terminal window I already have open and let the computer do the donkey-work.
The approach I am taking is Git, a distributed source-code-control system created by Linus Torvalds and subsequently beaten in to shape by a cast of thousands. Here’s how it works.
The first time I did this, I created an Git repository with SSH support on my server using this recipe for Hosting Git repositories, the Easy (and Secure) Way. The jolly thing about this is that its configuration is (of course) maintained with Git, and this means I can (of course) edit it in a working copy on my desktop and push changes to the server with Git.
Creating a Site User
First, visit some random password generator to create a password, and then SSH to my server to create a user to own the site, and create an SSH key for them:
titania$ sudo adduser jeremyday
... enter password when asked ...
titania$ su - jeremyday
titania$ ssh-keygen -t rsa
... enter password when asked ...
In this snippet, I have changed the server’s prompt to titania$ for clarity; my desktop is called oberon.
The username is the site name minus the .uk or .org suffixes. In this case the site name is http://jeremyday.org.uk/. (There should be no confusion with user names used for actual people, since I follow the ancient tradition of using initials for users’s accounts.)
The point of creating a separate user for each site I host is containment—if one web site runs amok, its ability to affect other sites’ files should be limited. Given that I am the only one using my server this is probably overkill, but it can’t hurt to keep things tidy, right?
Creating a Repository
The point of creating the public/private key pair is that I need to add this user to my Gitosis server. So on my desktop, in my text editor I open gitosis.conf and add something like
[group jeremyday]
readonly = jeremyday
members = @pdc jeremyday
—and add the site to an existing group I have called editors, so:
[group editors]
members = @pdc
writable = jeremyday …other sites listed here…
The group pdc is one I named after myself containing my IDs from a couple of different computers (since I was too dim to just copy the same key pair around). You will want to use something different.
Now I return to the terminal window containing the SSH session and use this command to display the new user’s public key:
titania$ cat /etc/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
And thus I can copy and paste the public key data from the terminal window in to a new file keydir/jeremyday.pub in the Gitosis admin folder. Now all I need do to create the new repository is
oberon$ git add keydir/jeremyday.key gitosis.conf
oberon$ git commit -m 'Added repository jeremyday'
oberon$ git push
Now we are ready to import the site in to the repository. I am trying to get in to the habit of doing
oberon$ git init
at the start of creating a new site, and to make commits at psychologically important moments. Now we need to introduce this local repository to the server’s repository:
oberon$ git remote add origin git@spreadsite.org:jeremyday.git
oberon$ git push origin master:refs/head/master
(where spreadsite.org is one of the DNS names for my server that happens to be fairly short). Repository is now filled, so I can switch to the terminal window with SSH in it and do
titania$ mkdir ~/Sites
titania$ cd ~/Sites
titania$ git clone git@spreadsite.org:jeremyday.git
At this point the repository is set up and I can use git push and git pull to update the server copy. Because it is going via Git, the updates are pretty fast—Git sends compressed deltas rather than a fresh copy of the whole file tree—and fairly secure—all the copying is done over SSH. It is also convenient in the sense of allowing for editing from odd places: I can now check out the site on my laptop, or even just SSH to my server, check out a copy in my user directory, and work on that.
Not the End
This is not the complete story of deployment, since I have not talked about setting up FasiCGI, Daemontools, and Nginx. Until I get around to that, check out the Django Advent recipe for Deploying a Django Site Using FastCGI.