Deploy from Git

What this does

A site can be built straight from a Git repository. NovaPanel clones your branch, runs the build for the site's runtime, and swaps the result into the document root only once it has been built successfully — so a failed build never takes the live site down.

Two things make it worth wiring up properly: push-to-deploy, so a push rebuilds the site with no one watching, and rollback, so a bad commit is one click away from being undone.

Connect a repository

Customer panel → Git Deploy. Pick the site, then set the repository URL and branch in Site Settings.

For a private repository, copy the deploy key shown on the Git Deploy page and add it to your repository's deploy keys (on GitHub: Settings → Deploy keys → Add deploy key). Read-only access is enough.

Turn on push-to-deploy

The Git Deploy page shows a webhook URL for the site. Copy it and add it to your repository:

• GitHub — Settings → Webhooks → Add webhook. Paste the URL, content type application/json, and leave it on "just the push event".
• GitLab — Settings → Webhooks. Paste the URL and tick Push events.

That URL contains a secret unique to the site, so treat it like a password — anyone holding it can trigger a deploy of that site. If you ever need to invalidate it, it is regenerated when the site's deploy settings are reset.

A push while a deploy is already running is skipped rather than queued twice, so a busy repository will not stack builds on top of each other. You get a notification either way, because nobody is watching the panel when a push lands.

Roll back a bad deploy

NovaPanel keeps the previous version of the document root. On the Git Deploy page, Restore previous version puts it back.

The rollback is instant: it does not rebuild, and it does not need the network or your Git host, which matters because a rollback is usually what you reach for when something is already broken. The version being replaced is kept, so a rollback can itself be undone.

For Node and Python sites the app is restarted and the web server repointed automatically as part of the rollback.

When the button is not there

Rollback appears only when a previous version actually exists on disk. It will not be there before the site's second deploy, or if the .nova-previous folder in the site directory was deleted over SFTP. Showing a button that would fail is worse than not showing one.

Custom build steps

On the Developer tier you can set a deploy command per site — run migrations, clear a cache, or perform any extra build step. It runs in the document root as the site's own Linux user, the same user and directory you already have over SSH.

What gets served

Version-control metadata is stripped from the document root on every deploy, and .git, .env and similar paths are refused by the web server. A repository's history — and any password ever committed to it — is never reachable from the site.