Push-to-deploy

Orbit ships its own self-hosted git workflow: a git push runs the tests, builds, and publishes — no external CI required.

How it works

A bare git repo on the server has a post-receive hook. On a push to main it:

Checks out the new commit.
Runs npm ci && npm run test && npm run build — gated, so a broken push never ships.
Publishes dist/ to the web root with rsync --delete (keeping a backup for rollback).

The whole loop is one command:

git commit -m "…"
git push          # test → build → deploy (+ mirror)

The hook (sketch)

#!/bin/bash
set -e; unset GIT_DIR
WORK=/path/to/checkout; WEBROOT=/var/www/site/app
while read -r _old new ref; do
  [ "$ref" = "refs/heads/main" ] || continue
  cd "$WORK"; git fetch -q self; git reset --hard -q self/main
  npm ci --silent && npm run test && npm run build
  rsync -a --delete dist/ "$WEBROOT/"
done

Bonus: IRC announcements

The same hook hands the commit list to a small bot that posts a GitHub-style summary to the project's IRC channel. See The #orbit channel & bot.