Hello friends,

I generate my blog with hexo, my third or fourth blog generator so far, and I’m really enjoying it. Hexo is really flexible, has all sorts of convenience functions, and is super easy to deploy (it’s literally just hexo deploy). Deploys were such a problem for me with my last blog generator that I didn’t write a blog post for 6 months! (It was seriously like five steps, and it was super slow even after I automated it!)

I’m super happy with hexo. This is my workflow:

# 100 freaking git commands, someone seriously
# needs to write a usable wrapper for git
$ git push      # push to server
$ hexo generate # generate static site
$ hexo deploy   # copy static site to remote host

But can I do better? (Yes)

I will always run hexo generate and hexo deploy after git push. Then why do I need to type them myself? I pay Amazon good money for Robot Computers in the Cloud™ (my buzzword game is on point), so let’s put those robots to good use and set up a git server-side hook to generate and deploy the site for us.

Git hooks

What are git hooks? Git hooks are scripts that you can tell git to run after certain events. There are many different flavors of git hooks, but we just need a server-side post-receive hook. (Btw, this won’t work with GitHub. But that’s okay, because setting up your own “private” GitHub is actually way easier than you probably think it is! As long as you have ssh access to a machine, you can create remote git repos on it. I’ll write a post about that soon, but you can follow the git book’s slightly overcomplicated setup for now.)

A post-receive server-side git hook is a hook that runs on your server after a push. git push won’t actually return until post-receive is finished running, so you can be sure that your site is completely generated/deployed after git push finishes.

THE ACTUAL HOOK (the moment you’ve all been waiting for)

First, some setup.

# BEFORE YOU START: Make sure you have npm and node set up correctly on
# your server.
$ ssh <username>@<your-server> # log into your server
$ cd <git-repo-for-site>/hooks # assuming your repo is a bare repository
$ touch post-receive           # create post-receive
$ chmod +x post-receive        # hook must be executable
$ nano post-receive            # s/nano/your-favorite-text-editor/

And then paste this sucker in:

#!/bin/sh

# Hooks are executed with the top level git repository as their working
# directory, i.e. "/home/person/site", not "/home/person/site/hooks".

# This script assumes your remote repo is a "bare" repository, which
# it should be. More info:
# http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Getting-Git-on-a-Server

# you can make arbitrary directories inside git repos
mkdir hexo-tmp
# check out the branch "master" into "hexo-tmp"
git --work-tree=hexo-tmp checkout master
# move to "hexo-tmp"
cd hexo-tmp
# install hexo modules into "hexo-tmp"
npm install
# generate your site (to "public" by default)
hexo generate
# copy your site (recursively, verbosely, preserving file metadata) from
# "public" to your website directory.
rsync -rva public/ <path-to-website, e.g. "~/www">
# clean up "hexo-tmp"
cd ..
rm -r hexo-tmp

(Make sure to change the path on the rsync ... line!)

And that’s it! The robots are doing your bidding, and git push is all you need to share your awesome blog posts with the world! You should see the output of all of those commands whenever you git push. (If you run into issues with the git hook, double check that you made post-receive executable. If it’s still broken, leave a comment.)

Now, there are some obvious ways to optimize this (like by installing the node modules globally once, instead of on every push), and I encourage you to optimize your own script yourself :D

happy hacking,
s