hooker

Hooker is a node-js web server that is designed to listen for postdata from a github Web-Hook service, pull the updates if required and re-deploy the application.

Hooker runs as a service alongside the application its intended to track and controls its state using ForeverJS

Requirements

NodeJS and Git (CLI Tools) are required on your webserver as well as ExpressJS for ease of setup and familiarity of layout.

Forever is also necessary

Usage

• Clone the repo to your server

• Use ForeverJS to start the server as a service eg forever start -o node.log -a app.js

$ cd /path/to/hooker
$ forever start -o node.log -a app.js

• Edit the configuration file located in public/config/cfg.json with the information of your repo, the format is as follows:

{
  "PATH": "/home/user/path/to/yourapproot",
  "GITREPO": "https://github.com/ammanvedi/seeder.git",
  "BRANCHNAME": "master",
  "EXNAME": "app.js",
  "LOGNAME":"node.log"
}

Field	Description
GITREPO	Name of the repository, this can either be the name of a remote, or a .git url
BRANCHNAME	Branch to pull updates from (default : master)
EXNAME	Name of the node server file (default is app.js i express)
LOGNAME	Name of the log file to use when re deploying the server
PATH	Path to the root of the application (and repository) of the application to be re-deployed

This JSON file is loaded and read when the server starts, so any changes require that the hooker service be restarted, ie;

$ forever restart 0

(make sure port 3000 is open for http in your security group)

• Start the application as service 1 in foreverjs (just start it running directly after the hooker server)

• Make sure you have an active webhook that is pointed to yourserver.com:3000/hook

• Hooker will listen for push events where the commit message contains the string "[redeploy]". At which point it will pull the changes and restart the app

So, for example a push like this from your local environment

$ git commit -m "fixed some bug [redeploy]"
$ git push origin master

Will trigger hooker to pull changes from the remote repository to the webserver

About

I built this while working on Seeder as a way to auto deploy the application to an Amazon EC2 server instance.

if you think its broken fix it

beerware license