Use rsync to deploy your website

rsync is a nifty little tool that can deploy a website to a testing or production server.

Here's a one line command to deploy brecksblog:

rsync -arvuz /home/user/brecksblog breck32@breckyunits.com:/var/www/html/ --exclude '.git' --exclude 'deploy' --exclude 'README' --exclude 'posts.php'

This one line will do a fast, incremental file transfer from my local directory to the web server.

I saved this file as "deploy", and then run it by typing:

./deploy

The exclude option will exclude a file or directory from being synced.

Here's an explanation about the options I use:

I use rsync with these options:

rsync -arvuz /src/foo/ /dest/foo

this will copy the contents of /src/foo/ into /dest/foo

options explained:

• a: archive mode (keep owner and permissions)
• r: recurse into directories
• v: increase verbosity
• u: update only (don't overwrite newer files - if you have edited files in destination)
• z: compress file data

Notes

1. If you are using a different port for SSH, say 333 do this: --rsh="ssh -p333"