grunt-sync-deploy

Automatically synchronize changed local files with your server.

This Grunt plugin is a simple deployment system which can run on your local environment. Every time you deploy, the plugin compares the file dates on your server with your local ones. This way it will upload only the new and changed files. This is valuable on managed servers that don't support complex autonomous deployments or version control.

What you need

• SSH access to your server
• Grunt: The JavaScript Task Runner
• This plugin

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt >=0.4.0

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-sync-deploy --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-sync-deploy');

The "syncdeploy" task

Overview

In your project's Gruntfile, add a section named syncdeploy to the data object passed into grunt.initConfig().

grunt.initConfig({
  syncdeploy: {
    main: {
      cwd: 'dist/',
      src: ['**/*']
    }
  }
});

You'll also have to add a sshconfig to pass the SSH configuration for your Server. Never keep your SSH credentials in source control!

// don't keep SSH credentials in source control!
deployInfo: grunt.file.readJSON('deploy_info.json'),
sshconfig: {
  production: {
    host:       '<%= deployInfo.host %>',
    port:       '<%= deployInfo.port %>', // optional
    username:   '<%= deployInfo.username %>',
    privateKey: '<%= deployInfo.privateKey %>',
    passphrase: '<%= deployInfo.password %>', // passphrase for your key, optional
    deployTo:   '<%= deployInfo.deployTo %>'
  }
}

You can also authenticate using a password:

// don't keep SSH credentials in source control!
deployInfo: grunt.file.readJSON('deploy_info.json'),
sshconfig: {
  production: {
    host:     '<%= deployInfo.host %>',
    port:     '<%= deployInfo.port %>', // optional
    username: '<%= deployInfo.username %>',
    password: '<%= deployInfo.password %>',
    deployTo: '<%= deployInfo.deployTo %>'
  }
}

deployTo is the folder on the SSH server you'd like to sync with the specified src.

To use this SSH configuration by default add grunt.option('config', 'production'); to the end of your Gruntfile.

Options

removeEmpty

Type: Boolean
Default: false

Remove empty directories inside the deployTo path on the SSH after deploying.

keepFiles

Type: Array
Default: []

Files to keep no matter whether there are newer local files. This can be useful for config files. Use an array with the paths to the files you want to keep. This has to be relative to the deployTo path. You can also use minimatch syntax here.

serverTimezone

Type: String
Default: ''

If the timezone of your server doesn't match up with your local one the syncing may not happen correctly. In this case you can declare the timezone of your server. For example: serverTimezone: 'GMT+0000'.

Multiple targets

You may have more than one target (e.g. staging, production) if you have multiple places which you want to deploy to.

// don't keep SSH credentials in source control!
deployInfo: grunt.file.readJSON('deploy_info.json'),
sshconfig: {
  staging: {
    host: '<%= deployInfo.host %>',
    port: '<%= deployInfo.port %>', // optional
    username: '<%= deployInfo.username %>',
    password: '<%= deployInfo.password %>',
    deployTo: '<%= deployInfo.deployTo %>'
  },
  production: {
    host: '<%= deployInfo.host %>',
    port: '<%= deployInfo.port %>', // optional
    username: '<%= deployInfo.username %>',
    password: '<%= deployInfo.password %>',
    deployTo: '<%= deployInfo.deployTo %>'
  }
}

You can use the different targets by passing the option in your terminal: grunt deploy --config=staging.