Hey Everyone,

Many of us has this problem of deploying our github repo to EC2 machines or Digital Ocean's droplets or etc. We can automate this process by running a simple webhook script on our machine.

Lets start !

The script

const secret = "secret-from-github";
const repo = "path-to-repo-on-machine(eg ~/react-project)";
const http = require('http');
const crypto = require('crypto');
const exec = require('child_process').exec;
const child = require('child_process');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
        let data= []

        req.on('data', function(chunk) {
                data.push(chunk);
        });

        req.on('end', () => {
                let sig = "sha1=" + crypto.createHmac('sha1', secret).update(data.toString()).digest('hex');
                if (req.headers['x-hub-signature'] == sig) {
                        if(JSON.parse(data).ref==='refs/heads/master'){
                                console.log('Deploying commit - ',JSON.parse(data).head_commit.message)
                                exec('cd ' + repo + ' && git pull origin master && npm install && npm run build && pm2 start npm -- start');
                        }
                }

        })

    res.end();
}).listen(8080);

• This script is first generating a sha signature using sceret and verifiying the request.
• If request signature matches our generated signature then we our parsing the payload to JSON.
• In this script we are receiving all the events that are being generated on our Github repo like commit , pull request, merge.
• I have a develop branch and a master branch.
• I am triggering the build when an event occurs on a master branch. if(JSON.parse(data).ref==='refs/heads/master')

• When we have a merge event to our master branch it will first go to your directory on server and run

👉🏻 git pull origin master

👉🏻 npm install

👉🏻 npm run build

👉🏻 pm2 start [pm2 is process manager for nodejs. you can replace it with npm start also ]

Note: git pull will ask for username and password.The prompt should not come thats our motive here. You need to either use ssh or use

git config credential.helper store

. Check this out here.I am using credential store as i am the only one accessing that server.

Now start the script using node or pm2.

Configuring the Machine.

If you are using nginx , create a proxy pass for it. You just need to open the port 8080 for communication.

• NGINX is a better option as you can assign subdomain to it and also ssl certificate.

Configuring Repo on Github

1. Go to Setting 👉🏻 Webhooks.
2. 
3. After adding the webhook , edit it and enforce ssl for better security.

That's it . Your are done 🎉.

You can find me on other platforms 👇

I am using this method in my latest project https://ismy.institute/

We are participating in YC SUS2020 also.