Git repo on FTP-server

Often, you have to deal with limited web hotels that only provide a customly made (and usually poor) administration page, FTP- and SQL-access. How can you, on a cheap web hotel, use git without ssh access? If you’re comfortable giving your git-password and ftp-password to a third party, using deployhq (guide here) is a simple and better alternative than the method below.

Assumptions

Let’s call the cheap hotel for “SimpleHost” and your own server/machine for ”MyAwesomeClient”.

• You have FTP-access to *SimpleHost. *
• You have sudo on MyAwesomeClient
• MyAwesomeClient has git

Incorrect Step-by-step (How you hope it would’ve been):

1. Connect from MyAwesomeClient to SimpleHost with FTP from the command line.
2. Mount FTP-server in debian using curlftpfs
3. Use git as normally.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it is. You’ll get stuff like :

fatal: Unable to create temporary file: Operation not supported

Step-by-step (How it is):

git clone https://github.com/git-ftp/git-ftp
cd git-ftp
git tags
git checkout 0.9.0  # Replace this with the newest version
sudo make install

You now have git-ftp installed, and can safely remove the folder

cd ..
rm -rf git-ftp

Go to your local repo that you want tracked remotely and initialize it remotely with

cd my_clean_repo
git ftp init -u [username] -p [password] \
  ftp://server.com/public_html

Make changes locally and upload them to the server with

git ftp push -u [username] -p [password] \
  ftp://server.com/public_html

Limitations

• You can’t track changes done on the remote server.
• It is careless with remote files. That is, if a file that is tracked in the local repository is changed on the remote server AND the local server, git ftp will overwrite it without warning.
• The two above is important to have in mind when collaborating with others.

Worth mentioning

• You can set default ftp paths and login info. See git ftp man page
• You can use sftp, ftps, ftpes as well.
• You can skip specifying password in the command line, and will then be prompted instead.