How do I avoid deploying from scratch on my first deployment?

Selecting a specific commit for your server in your environment

When you set up a new server in DeployBot, the first deployment will always be deployed from scratch. This means DeployBot will take all the files in the repository and upload them to your remote server. This is done to ensure that your repository and files on your remote server are in sync. DeployBot will memorize the commit that was deployed and all future deployments will be done incrementally from that commit.

While this works great when the remote server’s directory is empty, for those customers who already have existing files on the server, it can cause issues. For this reason, our deployment tools allow you to choose the most recent revision that exists on your remote server from which DeployBot will start deploying.

For example, say your repository is currently at commit 659f9aa2. All the files up to that commit are already on your remote server. You want to set up a new deployment server in DeployBot, but you don’t want it to re-deploy all those files that already exist on your remote server. To do that you would need to set commit 659f9aa2 as the starting commit on the setup page. After that is done, DeployBot will assume that your remote server is up to date to commit 659f9aa2, and will only deploy incremental changes starting from that commit.

Please note, leaving DeployBot to deploy from scratch will not break anything. If you have all the files on your server, it will just take longer for us to deploy. It may, however, bring something on your site offline depending on the way your web server is configured.

To select a commit to deploy from, click the 'Advanced options' section in the server setup page and use the 'Current commit' dropdown menu to select the commit.