Git is an excellent resource to use for web development as it allows you to streamline live updates in addition to providing a copy of your website files.

For example, you can create your website on your home computer and use Git to push a copy of those files to your DreamHost web server. If anything happens to your home computer, you still have a full copy on the web server. You can then configure this web server repository to push live changes to your website.

First, follow all steps in the following article:

If you followed all of the steps in that article, your local Git repository on your computer is now copied to your DreamHost server (as a remote repository). But, those changes are just sitting in the remote repository.

If you want your live website to update when you push code to the server, you can add a post-receive hook. This step creates a file to copy updates from your remote server repo to your live site. This example uses a text editor program named nano. View the Creating and editing a file via SSH article for further information on how to edit a file.

1. Log into your web server via SSH.
2. Make sure you're in your remote repository directory.

   [server]$ cd ~/example.com.git

3. Run nano and create a file named post-receive:

   [server]$ nano hooks/post-receive

4. Add this code to the file. It tells where to push these changes. In this example, change username to your actual shell user, change example.com to your website.

   #!/bin/sh
   GIT_WORK_TREE=/home/username/example.com git checkout -f

5. Save and close your file to return to your shell.
6. Give the file execute rights.

   [server]$ chmod +x hooks/post-receive

Now when you push from your local computer's repository to the server, those changes are automatically added to your live website.

Did this article answer your questions?