gitlab, post-receive, deploy

Question

Is should be simple but perhaps I don't understand the big picture here. I have setup a GitLab (omnibus) that is working wonderful on Ubuntu 16.04/Apache. On the same machine (the same Apache) I have the www that is supposed to be updated through GitLab.

Since I am on the same machine, it's useless to use webhooks or other complicated mechanisms. I just want to copy "on commit to master" to www folder so I choose custom_hooks as explained here http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/administration/custom_hooks.html

I created a file post-receive, gave git rights (and folder too) and trigger is working

#!/bin/bash
mkdir testdir

The directory is created on commits.

May be a stupid question but where are the GIT repo files to be copied?

I saw a lot of tutorials that are creating hooks on client side, should I make another GIT client in www folder and use it's hooks?

This can't be done on GIT server side in gitlab master folder?

Thanks in advance for guidance,

Answer 1

Ok, I figured out myself. In case anyone needs, first I found a excellent tutorial here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-git-hooks-to-automate-development-and-deployment-tasks

What I've completely missed, is that installation of GitLab doesn't install the git itself :) Just creates a user+group 'git'. So all GitLab projects folders with git structure in:

/var/opt/gitlab/git-data/repositories/<GROUP>/<PROJECT>

are just (git) folders, pushed by clients like I tried and successfully pushed from another machine in my network (from windows)

Now the problem resumes to install git of course on server machine, where GitLab resides:

sudo apt-get install git

Then, test that you can checkout some branch and copy to /www/ folder (folder must have permissions for user so for future, git)

git --work-tree=/var/www/html/<MY_WWW_DEPLOY_FOLDER> --git-dir=/var/opt/gitlab/git-data/repositories/<MY_GITLAB_PROJECT_REPO> checkout -f

Success. All the files appeared in deploy folder now.

Further, the problem resumes to trigger automatic deploy when someone is pushing the repo and for this, you MUST create a folder named custom_hooks inside GitLab project folder

/var/opt/gitlab/git-data/repositories/<MY_GITLAB_PROJECT_REPO>/custom_hooks/

Inside, create a new file called post-receive and give +x rights for git user I haven't complete this part yet since I haven't decide what language to use for post-receive. Seems that can be any type, even a C compiled executable as long as have +x rights and is ready to accept some (poor doccumented) GIT callback arguments.

Cheers,