Checkout automatically after push

Question

Basically, I just want to use git as sort of a versioned one-way FTP.

I have a local git repo in local/. I want to push it to server:remote/, and I want that afterwards all files are checked out in remote on the server (identically to what it looks locally, assuming I git-added everything)

In other words, I want to reproduce this behaviour from Mercurial:

[hooks]
changegroup.update = hg update && echo updated successfully.

I found tons of tutorials that do this with two separate directories on the server side, but I would prefer to use a single one. Is that possible? When I try it, I get the message, below which I don't really understand.

What would be the best practice to do this? (If necessary, you can assume I never change anything on the server, so --forceing something would not be a problem.)

remote: error: refusing to update checked out branch: refs/heads/master
remote: error: By default, updating the current branch in a non-bare repository
remote: error: is denied, because it will make the index and work tree inconsistent
remote: error: with what you pushed, and will require 'git reset --hard' to match
remote: error: the work tree to HEAD.
remote: error: 
remote: error: You can set 'receive.denyCurrentBranch' configuration variable to
remote: error: 'ignore' or 'warn' in the remote repository to allow pushing into
remote: error: its current branch; however, this is not recommended unless you
remote: error: arranged to update its work tree to match what you pushed in some
remote: error: other way.
remote: error: 
remote: error: To squelch this message and still keep the default behaviour, set
remote: error: 'receive.denyCurrentBranch' configuration variable to 'refuse'.

Answer 1

I want to reproduce this behaviour from Mercurial:

With recent git versions, the setting mentioned in the error message now supports a new value:

[receive]
    denyCurrentBranch = updateInstead

This should give you exactly the behavior you want.

• http://databio.org/posts/push_to_deploy.html
• https://blog.tfnico.com/2015/05/a-better-way-to-git-push-to-deploy.html

---

I found tons of tutorials that do this with two separate directories on the server side

As an alternative, you can still use most of these tutorials, by pushing to a different branch (i.e. not to the currently checked out one, but to something like deploy).

git push origin master:deploy

Now you can use similar (or even the same) post-receive or post-update hooks as if you were pushing to a bare repository. For example, the hook could run git merge --ff-only deploy or even git reset --hard deploy.

Answer 2

Before first commit into remote repo to avoid error: refusing to update I forced to do:

git config receive.denycurrentbranch ignore

To enable auto checkout it is enought to set

git config receive.denycurrentbranch updateInstead