Setting up Git on a Server

Introduction

I've been testing out Git a bit more recently. The main feature that interests me is the way Git branches. It's light-weight and is managed pretty well by the Git software. for more information, see Chapter 3 of the Git Book.

My plan is to use Git for synchronizing changes I make in my local development for my web server with the live version. I also want Git to manage a development server path which will switch to the branch I last pushed to for testing purposes. Luckily, both of these are fairly simple operations.

Setting up a SVN Server

Introduction

I've recently added some revision control to my Ubuntu virtual server. I added Subversion and Git support. Here I'm documenting the process I used to setup a Subversion server.

I'm following for the most part Ubuntu's SVN tutorial.

SSH Key-Pair Authentication

Introduction

In the past I've limited SSH access to my Ubuntu virtual server by using static IP addresses. This works, but I've recently implemented a better method for ensuring SSH security for my virtual server. It uses the private/public key authentication method.

This is actually the method used pretty much everywhere else because it doesn't require hard-coded static IP addresses.

This is based mostly on the HowtoForge article about Key-Based SSH Logins with PuTTY.

Setting up a LEMP Virtual Server part 3

Introduction

This is the third part of my LEMP virtual server setup. This portion involves installing the NginX web server, MySQL database, and PHP software.

Setting up a LEMP Virtual Server part 2

Introduction

This is the second part of my LEMP virtual server setup. This portion involves configuring various virtual machine settings. I'll also go over the basic setup for SSH and SAMBA access.

Setting up a LEMP Virtual Server Part 1

Introduction

Recently I was in the process of setting up a LEMP virtual server. The idea was to have a private web server that I could play around and test with. Since I didn't have a spare computer to host my server, I decided to go with a virtual server. A LEMP server consists of:

• Linux Operating System
• NginX Web Server
• MySQL Database
• PHP5 dynamic webpage scripting

For those familiar with the more common LAMP server, the LEMP server is a slight modification. It uses the NginX Web Server instead of the Apache Web Server. There are a few key benefits of using NginX over Apache. The primary claimed benefit is that NginX scales better to large server loads. I haven't verified this claim myself yet, but there are various benchmarks online which seem to back this claim. The great thing about the setup I have is I could easily setup a LAMP server as well and compare the two.

In this part I'm going to go over the various setup required on the host machine and Virtual Box settings, as well as installing the Ubuntu operating system.

Here's a few of the details for the virtual server I'm setting up:

• Virtual Box for the virtual machine software.
• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64-bit Server OS. Note that at the time of this writing the latest version of Ubuntu is 12.10. I'm not entirely sure what the technical differences between the two are. Ubuntu 12.10 is advertised to have the latest technology, but it isn't a LTS (Long Time Support) version of Ubuntu, which Ubuntu 12.04 is. The LTS versions are supported for 5.5 years vs. the 2.5 years for non-LTS versions. This isn't a major factor for a private test server, but may be a deal breaker for production-quality/public servers.
• Putty Telnet/SSH client for Windows. Note that for people using a Linux OS or any OS with good SSH support via the terminal you won't need a separate client.
• MySQL Workbench for managing the MySQL database on my host machine.