gw

Watch local git repositories, keep in sync with remote and run commands.

Motivation

As continuos deployment is getting more of an industry standard, lot of teams are looking for a tool that allows them to only merge to master and have these changes immediately rolled out to live. For a long time, teams were forced to use proprietary hosting (e.g. Netlify or Vercel), build their own push-based CI pipelines (e.g. on GitHub Actions or GitLab Ci) or use heavyweight pull-based architecture (e.g. ArgoCD). It is especially difficult with deployments on-prem or behind a VPN. gw is a lightweight tool that runs on the servers directly, pulls if there are changes in the remote repo and runs commands. You can run a build command, restart your deployment or anything you can imagine.

Get started

To get started install the gw binary:

cargo binstall gw-bin
# or
cargo install gw-bin

Usage

All you have to do is point to a local repository and add a script to run, if there is an update.

To get started, all you have to do is to point gw to a local repository. This will run git fetch periodically and pull if there are any changes.

gw /path/to/repo

To make it more useful, we can use the --script (or -s) flag to run commands when there are updates. You can define multiple scripts however for multiple commands or advanced logic, it is recommended to use a update.sh file in the repository.

gw /path/to/repo --script 'echo pulled'
gw /path/to/repo --script 'echo building' --script 'echo deploying'

To put this in the background simply wrap this in a systemd unit or docker container.

But this is not all gw can do. With a little creativity you can create a lot of things, for example:

• pull changes for development and get a notification;
• rollout a docker-compose deployment continously;
• build on all commits for a minimal Netlify alternative;
• build on tags for a versioned documentation website,

...and many thing else. For a complete list, check out the recipes page.