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How to clone git to a server?

Is there a good reason to avoid installing Git on your web server?

  • I've heard people say (far enough in the past that I can't go back and ask them to back up their position, or remember if they gave reasons) that you should never install Git on your (web or app) servers.  I can't come up with a good reason *not* to install it, and having it installed can make deployments much more convenient. For instance, using http://mina-deploy.github.io/mina/ with a few configuration settings I can generate a Bash script that is pushed to the server and does everything necessary to deploy the latest version of an app.  But Mina assumes you have Git installed on the server. (I would prefer to use Mina over something like Capistrano, since Capistrano sends individual Bash commands to the server, rather than one cohesive script.  This means that state is lost between commands.  That doesn't matter for simple deployments, but I've run into problems caused by this in the past.) (I could also just write my own shell script to do the deployment, pulling down a tarball or zipfile from GitHub and doing everything directly in the script.  The problem with that is in every case I've decided to script something in a shell script and the script is used over any period of time, it grows in complexity and reaches a point where I ask myself "why on earth did you not just write this in Ruby in the first place!?  It would have saved an enormous amount of time!".  Mina is already written and does what I need, and is superior to having to log into the server to manually trigger a remote script.)

  • Answer:

    I agree with Don, it's fine to install Git on a server. It makes various deployment strategies possible and removes a lot of pain and suffering that comes from not using Git.  It has been immensely useful in variety of situations to use Git on the server itself to keep track of changes of directories like /etc if you don't deploy these  from git repositories themselves or automation scripts stored in git repositories.

Zach Dennis at Quora Visit the source

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It's fine to install git and use it over ssh, but don't run the http://git-scm.com/docs/git-daemon on a production server.

Don Marti

While it’s a good idea to not install things you don’t need on a web server, git as a deployment tool is a perfectly legitimate usage.However, three caveats. As noted, do not run the git-daemon. You’re going to do pulls from somewhere else Give due consideration to what user and group to run git as. This user should have access to just what is needed to update the web server deployment. This may be more access than is needed for the web server itself (i.e. write access to things the web server should only have read access to). Do not store your credentials for the remote repository on your web server. If your server is compromised, it puts your repo and possibly the server on which the repo is hosted at risk. This last is important. While git’s use of hashes makes it impossible to alter a commit, there is nothing to prevent an attacker from pushing a new commit that appears to be from someone else. SSH credentials might also give other access as well.Instead, use SSH’s forwarding agent feature, to allow the credentials to live on a system that initiates the deployment — whether your development machine, or deployment server, or whatever.Here are some directions for using SSH’s forwarding agent feature, courtesy of githubhttps://developer.github.com/guides/using-ssh-agent-forwarding/

Bob Kerns

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