Deploying Sites with SCP

SCP is "secure copy". It works just like the "cp" command on your server, except it works for copying files between servers (in both directions) and uses SSH.

# Local "copy" example
cp src/file dest/file

# Use "scp" to copy files remotely, recursively
scp -r /some/local/directory  user@ip-address:/path/to/remote/location

This is the simplest form of deployment since it's just moving files.

SCP works over SSH, so we can re-use our SSH knowledge to login as well. Let's deploy a simple set of HTML files for an "application":

cd ~/Sites/serialapp
scp ./* serial@45.55.209.211:~/serialapp.com/current/public/

That didn't work, but we recognize the error (too many login attempts).

We can re-use our SSH options to set the identity key and other options:

# Use our ssh key
scp -o "IdentitiesOnly yes" \
    -i ~/.ssh/id_series \
    ./* serial@45.55.209.211:~/serialapp.com/current/public/

SCP conveniently uses the same options as the SSH command.

That's basically it.

Since we created an aliases in our ~/.ssh/config file, we can make this even simpler by using the serial-app host:

scp ./* serial-app:~/serialapp.com/current/public/

And voíla, we get our files uploaded to the server!