STOP USING FTP! - How to Deploy with Flightplan over SSH

Key Takeaways

So, if you are using FTP to as a way of getting your files into production for a website, uh, say you use Cyberduck or something, you drag your files in, there's a much better way. I know I recently did a video where I showed you how to sign up for hosting from HostGator, and I showed you how to use FTP to get the files over, but that's really an entrylevel way of getting in. If you learn just a couple more things, you can do this in a much more stable, much more much more trustworthy, and an easier, much faster way. Uh there's absolutely no reason this should take this long uh just to put a few files online when you make changes. So, we're going to stop this and close this. Yes, please stop. Get out of here. Uh let's go do this in a much better way. Uh so, what you're going to need, I have a gist here that I will put the link to online, and we're just going to step right through it so you can see how easy this is. Couple prerequisites. Let's make sure you install Node.js from node.js.org. Now, let's make sure you have git on your machine uh or GitHub as it's often called and uh make sure get that on your computer and then let's move forward. So, you're going to open up your terminal and you're going to run this command npm install-g. The -ash g is important the first time. Flight plan. The - g means we're going to install it globally, which means we're actually going to have access to the fly command. Now I can say fly. There's no target specified, but fly is on my machine. And then you're going to get into your folder that your project is in, which is wills awesomesite.com for me. And then I'm just going to run No, I'm not going to run Will's awesome site. I'm going to run npm install flight plan without the G. And that's going to actually install it into my project. So now you can see if I go to my project, I have node modules and flight plan is in there. So that's great. And next up, if your project is not currently a Git repository, you don't really have to know what that means, but you're going to need to run these three commands in your project. And that's get init. Let me uh clean this up here for you. Get init. There you go. Now, I'm my project is a Git repository. Get add- capital A and get commit- M. And then in quotes, you're going to do a commit message. first commit. There you go. Now all my files are in a GitHub repository. The only prerequisite to using flight plan is you have to keep your files in a GitHub repository. So now we're going to create our flight plan.js file. Let me copy this new file. Paste it in. Save it as flight plan.js. There we go. Now I have flight plan.js. The only thing you're going to want to change is your host to be your website and your username to be whatever your HostGator or whatever login is. Now, one of the reasons I recommend HostGator is they allow you to SSH in. That's something your host has to allow you to do in order to do this kind of deployment. U they rec this is for HostGator right here. When HostGator allows you to SSH in, you have to do it to port 2222. Some lots of web hosts don't allow you to SSH in at all. Some require you to use a different port. So that's something you're going to need to know if you're not using HostGator. And that's it. I've called this target production, which means if I hit fly production, it's going to copy all my files to production. Okay, so that's it. I've saved it and let's test it out. Let's just go fly production. Copying them all. It's going to ask for my password. And there you go. It did it. You're like, no way. There's no way it was that easy. Oh, really? Well, let's check it out. Let's go to index.html. And instead of learn code being really rocks, it's really rocks. Fly production. Ask for my password. There you go. And let's refresh our website. Learn code really rocks. No way. Why was that so fast? Because this uses arsync and rsync only pushes the files that changed. Uh, which is really nice. refresh. There you go. Learn code. Now it just really rocks. So there you are. That's how to do great deployments using flight plan for any kind of website. And if that if you want to make it if that password gets really annoying for you, I have an SSH video that will show you how to set up passwordless SSH. So you don't need to type that every time. So your computer is authorized to do that to the server without a password. Hope you enjoyed this video. Have a great day.