Publish my site on Flywheel with Git and DeployHQ

Git is a great way to track changes to files within a codebase, but it can be confusing to know how to deploy those changes to a remote site.

Using a tool like Local, you can deploy to Flywheel servers using Local Connect. Git uses several files within its .git folder to work its magic. Because these supporting files aren’t needed in a production environment, Local ignores them when pushing a site up to our servers. This results in less data being moved and faster Pushes.

But maybe you already have a development environment created or for some reason can’t use Local? The rest of this article will walk through another option for deploying code using DeployHQ (HINT: this is how we deploy the getflywheel.com site).

DeployHQ allows you to set up all types of manual and automatic deployment for your sites. It supports Git, Mercurial, and Subversion code repositories, and can deploy to many types of destinations including FTP/SFTP, Amazon S3, and more.

For the purposes of deploying to Flywheel, we are going to focus on using DeployHQ to deploy a Git repository to your Flywheel site via SFTP.

In order to utilize DeployHQ to publish your Git repo to Flywheel, you will need the following prerequisites:

The steps for connecting DeployHQ and Flywheel are simple, and take just a few minutes to set up. Once you’re set up, you can choose from two types of deployments:

The method used is up to you, and you can switch at any time.

To get started, log in to your DeployHQ account and create a new project:

From there, add the details of your Git repository. You can either specify the full URL of the repository, or for any supported SCM (Software Configuration Management) system shown, you can authorize DeployHQ to access your account and automatically pull a list of your repos:

Once you’ve selected or set up your repository and it’s been imported, you’ll need to add and configure the server you’ll be deploying to. Click on SSH/SFTP to reveal the configuration and options sections.

These are the settings for your Flywheel site that will be the destination for the files that are deployed from your Git repo.

SSH Configuration

Deployment Options

Notification Options

From the dropdown menu, choose your preferred notification option. Note: The project default can be updated in the project Settings.

The final step to configuring DeployHQ to deploy to your Flywheel account is to create a deployment. To do so, select the server you just created, and select your Start and End Revisions to deploy. You can click on the list icon beside each to choose a different commit for Start or End.

Clicking “Deploy” will take your code from the Git repository, and will deploy it to your Flywheel site via SFTP. Once the deployment is complete, you will be notified by email (if you selected always notify in the Notification Options for the server) and your changes will be live on Flywheel!

To run this deployment in the future, log into your DeployHQ account, and click the “Deploy” button for your project, and all the latest committed changes will be pulled from your Git repo and deployed to your Flywheel account.

Need help?

If you have any questions our Happiness Engineers are here to help!