Simple deploys with NPM and rsync

If you’re building a JavaScript heavy static site (perhaps you’re using something like vue-cli or create-react-app, or perhaps you’re rolling your own Webpack config like I’m doing in the examples), using something like Capistrano for deployment is a lot of extra work, while messing about with FTP is annoying and error-prone. Let’s split the difference, and use some simple tools to make life easier.

Requirements

• A machine with rsync (any Mac, most (all?) flavours of Linux, Windows 10 Linux subsystem)
• Node JS with npm (or yarn)
• SSH access to your host

Initial implementation

Throughout the examples, I’m assuming that npm run build will compile your project into a project-name folder with an index.html, which you can then serve from the path of your choice on the server. To start with, we can run the build step, then manually run the command to copy the files to the remote host:

// package.json
"scripts": {
  "build": "webpack --config webpack.production.js"
}

// terminal:
$ rsync -avz --delete project-name deployuser@server.domain:/path/to/static/files/"

This works, but means you have to keep track of that deploy command and all those rsync flags are just begging for a typo. Let’s automate it a little.

Make it a script

You can run shell commands from NPM scripts, so we’ll clean that up into a single, self-documenting, easily typed command:

// package.json
"scripts": {
  "build": "webpack --config webpack.production.js",
  "deploy": "webpack --config webpack.production.js && rsync -avz --delete project-name deployuser@server.domain:/path/to/static/files/"
}

// terminal
$ npm run deploy

Scripts can call other scripts

NPM scripts can not only call shell commands, they can call other NPM scripts. We’ll use a dedicated transfer script, and call that along with build when we deploy:

// package.json
"scripts": {
  "build": "webpack --config webpack.production.js",
  "transfer": "rsync -avz --delete project-name deployuser@server.domain:/path/to/static/files/",
  "deploy": "npm run build && npm run transfer"
}

// terminal
$ npm run deploy

Refactor paths into NPM variables

As a final step, if you’re sharing your code publicly you might want to avoid hard-coding the deploy user and path into the repo. NPM lets you add additional global config variables via the .npmrc file, which defaults to ~/.npmrc. We can make our deploy path part of that config and refer to it in package.json with the $npm_config_ prefix:

// .npmrc
deploy_path = deployuser@server.domain:/path/to/static/files/

// package.json
"scripts": {
  "build": "webpack --config webpack.production.js",
  "transfer": "rsync -avz --delete project-name $npm_config_deploy_path",
  "deploy": "npm run build && npm run transfer"
}

// terminal
$ npm run deploy

You can also have an .npmrc file in your project directory, if you don’t mind either checking it in to version control or adding it to your project’s .gitignore file.

Bonus tip for Ruby users

It’s worth noting you can do much the same thing using Ruby and rake instead of Node and npm.

# Rakefile

namespace :deploy do
  desc "Build the website from source"
  task :build do
    status = system("npm run build")
    puts status ? "OK" : "FAILED"
  end

  desc "Deploy website via rsync"
  task :push do
    status = system("rsync -avz --delete project-name deployuser@server.domain:/path/to/static/files/")
    puts status ? "OK" : "FAILED"
  end
end

desc "Build and deploy website"
  task :deploy => ["deploy:build", "deploy:push"] do
end

# terminal
$ rake deploy

If you’re using NPM already I don’t see much reason to use rake instead but it might be useful if you’re using other Ruby tools.

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