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Continuous Deployment of Websites With Travis CI

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In my not-so-humble opinion, Travis CI is one of the greatest things to come out of Germany. It’s a free CI service for your public github projects (or paid for your private ones). I use it for everything I make, and today I went down the rabbit hole to figure out how to use it not just for continuous integration, but also continuous deployment of my websites.

So let’s say you already have your website checked into a github repository. Every Travis setup is defined in a file called .travis.yml, and because we want to separate this file and the .git directory from our website code, we move the site to a directory of its own. Move all of your existing files into a folder named source. In my case, this consisted of a couple of html files, some subdirectories and a .htaccess file:

mkdir source
git mv *.* .ht* source

Next, I like to create a directory for bash scripts named s (I’m a lazy typist), and then add a script that runs my build to it:

mkdir s
echo '#!/bin/bash' > s/travis-build
chmod 755 s/travis-build

Open s/travis-build in your favorite editor, and insert the following:

#!/bin/bash
abort() {
    local message=$1
    echo $message
    exit -1
}
[ -z $FTP_PASS ] && abort "FTP_PASS is undefined"
[ -z $FTP_USER ] && abort "FTP_USER is undefined"
[ -z $FTP_SITE ] && abort "FTP_SITE is undefined"
lftp -u $FTP_USER,$FTP_PASS $FTP_SITE \
 -e 'mirror -c -e -R source ~ ; exit'

I’m assuming here that the website lives in the home directory of your FTP server account, change the ~ to ~/public_html or any other remote directory if that’s not the case.

Finally, create a file named .travis.yml in your repository’s root directory, and make it look like this:

sudo: false
addons:
  apt:
    packages:
    - lftp
os: linux
script: s/travis-build

You may have noticed that the travis-build script expects a few environment variables to be set, among them FTP_USER and FTP_PASS for the username and password of the account. For security reasons, we certainly do not want to put out FTP password into a public github repository, so we’re using a feature of Travis that allows us to encrypt environment variables. To do this, you need to install the Travis command line client, and then run the following commands (insert your own password, username and ftp server data where appropriate):

travis encrypt FTP_PASS=password --add env.matrix
travis encrypt FTP_USER=username --add env.matrix
travis encrypt FTP_SITE=ftp.mysite.com --add env.matrix

Now create an account with Travis, add your repository to the ones that it should monitor for building, and push all your changes. Voila! Your website is now automatically deployed after each push.

For bonus points, if your website has integration tests, run those in your s/travis-build script before the lftp command, and if they fail, skip the deployment.

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