Deploy Your Website Using Laravel and Git

Introduction

You can’t be a successful web developer without using some sort of deployment workflow for your websites. It doesn’t matter how good or bad your workflow might be. If you can’t get your website up to production then your client will never pay you for your hard work.

There are many different ways to deploy your website to your production server. Each one of them has their own list of pros and cons, and each one starts and finishes the same way. What makes a good website deployment workflow is what happens in the between.

The other day I was working on a project where I was using FileZilla to FTP my files up to my live production server. I’ve never considered FileZilla to be the easiest interface to use, but for the longest time I thought it to be standard practice.

For the same project, I was also using Git to track my file changes. I started to type out git push origin when I stopped to think to myself. Wouldn’t it be convenient if deploying websites was as easy as pushing Git repositories?

If you think about it, Git is the perfect tool to handle website files in deployment. It keeps track of all your file changes, and it pushes or pulls only what it needs with one command. I decided to set out on a Google journey to search for a way to use Git when deploying my own websites.

One popular method I found using Git to deploy your websites is by making good use of Git Hooks (Tom Oram likes to use a similar approach). Imagine as soon as you type git push origin into your terminal console, Git Hooks launch a predefined script. That predefined script accesses your production server and pulls your most recent file changes. With the same command you used to push your changes, you were also able to update your website. I thought this method was awesome until I realized that just because I push my local repository doesn’t mean I am ready to go live with it.

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