BitBucket Sync

This is a lightweight utility script that synchronizes the local file system with updates from a BitBucket project.

Description

This script keeps the files deployed on dedicated or shared-hosting web-servers in sync with the updates made on a BitBucket project.

It is intended to be used on a web-server which is reachable from the internet and which can accept POST requests coming from BitBucket. It works by getting all the updates from a BitBucket project and applying them to a local copy of the project files.

For example, supposing you have a website which is deployed on a shared-hosting server, and the source code is stored in a private repository in BitBucket. This script allows you to automatically update the deployed website each time you push changes to the BitBucket project. This way, you don't have to manually copy any file from your working directory to the hosting server.

BitBucket Sync will synchronize only the files which have been modified, thus reducing the network traffic and deploy times.

Installation

Prerequisites

This script requires PHP 5.3+ with cURL and Zip extensions enabled and any web-server offering PHP support (most shared web hosting solutions should work fine).

Installation instructions

• Get the source code for this script from BitBucket, either using Git, or downloading directly:

  • To download using git, install git and then type

    git clone git@bitbucket.org:alixandru/bitbucket-sync.git bitbucket-sync

  • To download directly, go to the project page and click on Download

• Copy the source files to your web-server in a location which is accessible from the internet (usually public_html, or www folders)

• Adjust configuration file config.php with information related to your environment and BitBucket projects that you want to keep in sync (see Configuration section).

• Perform an initial import of each project, through which all the project files are copied to the web-server file-system (see Notes section below).

• Configure all your BitBucket projects that you want to keep synchronized to post commit information to your web server through the POST service hook. See more information on how to create a service hook in BitBucket. The POST URL should point to the gateway.php script. For example, http://mysite.ext/bitbucket-sync/gateway.php.

• Start pushing commits to your BitBucket projects and see if the changes are reflected on your web server. Depending on the configuration, you might need to manually trigger the synchronization by accessing the deploy.php script through your web server (i.e. http://mysite.ext/bitbucket-sync/deploy.php).

Notes

This script has two complementary modes of operation detailed below.

1. Commit synchronization

This is the default mode which is used when the deploy.php script is accessed with no parameters in the URL. In this mode, the script updates only the files which have been modified by a commit that was pushed to the repository. The script reads commit information saved locally by the gateway script and attempts to synchronize the local file-system with the updates that have been made in the BitBucket project. The list of files which have been changed (added, updated or deleted) will be taken from the commit files. This script tries to optimize the synchronization by not processing files more than once.

2. Full synchronization

This mode can be enabled by specifying the setup GET parameter in the URL in which case, the script will get the full repository from BitBucket and deploy it locally. This is achieved through getting a zip archive of the project, extracting it locally and copying its contents over to the project location specified in the configuration file. This operation mode does not necessarily need a POST service hook to be defined in BitBucket for the project and is generally suited for initial set-up of projects that will be kept in sync with this script.

Steps on how to get a project set up

If your repository is called my-library, you need to define it in the config.php file and to specify, at least, a valid location, accessible for writing by the web server process. Optionally you can state the branch from which the deployment will be performed.

After this step, simply access the script deploy.php with the parameter ?setup=my-library (i.e. http://mysite.ext/bitbucket-sync/deploy.php?setup=my-library). It is advisable to have verbose mode enabled in the configuration file, to see exactly what is happening.

By default, the script will attempt to get the project from a BitBucket repository created under your name (i.e. if your user is johndoe, it will try to get the repository johndoe/my-library). If the project belongs to a team or to another user, use the URL parameter team to specify it. For example, accessing http://mysite.ext/bitbucket-sync/deploy.php?setup=my-library&team=doeteam will fetch the project doeteam/my-library. Useful also for forks.

Full synchronization mode also supports cleaning up the destination folder before attempting to import the zip archive. This can be done by specifying the clean URL parameter (i.e. http://mysite.ext/bitbucket-sync/deploy.php?setup=my-library&clean=1). When this parameter is present, the contents of the project location folder (specified in the configuration file) will be deleted before performing the actual import. Use this with caution.

Once the import is complete, you can go on and setup the service hook in BitBucket and start pushing changes to your project.

Configuration

Firstly the script needs to have access to your BitBucket project files through the BitBucket API. If your project is private, you need to provide the user name and password of a BitBucket account with read access to the repository.

Then the script needs to know where to put the files locally once they are fetched from the BitBucket servers. The branch of the repository to deploy and a few other items can also be configured.

All of this information can be provided in the config.php file. Detailed descriptions of all configuration items is contained as comments in the file.

Change log

v2.0.1

• Improved the full synchronization support.
• Cleaning the destination before import is now an optional operation, triggered only by clean parameter
• Fixed issue with branch which was not correctly determined if multiple branches were pushed

v2.0.0

• Implemented the ability to fully synchronize the project by getting the entire project content at once.

v1.0.0

• Initial public release, which supports only synchronizing files which were changed.

Disclaimer

This code has not been extensively tested on highly active, large BitBucket projects. You should perform your own tests before using this on a live (production) environment for projects with a high number of updates.

This code has been tested with Git repositories only, however Mercurial projects should theoretically work fine as well.

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.