Or, How tech support isn’t all that supportive

In our last exciting instalment we were quite happy with our new web home except for one feature…the lack of rsync. Today, the exciting conclusion…

The issue

I use Hugo to generate a static files for several of my sites. One Hugo site is hosted on Netlify and is based off GitHub. So all I do is edit the files and sync them to Github. Netlify then grabs the files, compiles them and updates the site. It’s a great system and, FWIW, completely free.

The other main site that employs Hugo is my professional site (astart.ca) and with it I went a different route. I make the changes and using a handy script from the Hugo site, I run a command — ./deploy — and it automatically compiles the site then uploads it immediately to my web host. Or at least it did. Rsync didn’t seem to work on my new host.

Call support

Of course in the new a modern age you can just click on a link and chat with support. So I did. They informed me that my shared hosting did not include root access and I would need root access to use rsync. If I wanted I could upgrade to a cloud server… only ~$43/month. Lol. Seriously ROTFL. I mean ROTFLMAO. That would magically transform my $148 cad investment into $1584. Did I mention Lol?

I thanked him politely and went looking for another solution.

Everything is somewhere on the internet

One search phrase and a couple of clicks later and I arrived here: http://oerinet.net/wordpress/synchronizing-files-with-rsync-on-godaddy-shared-hosting/. It was GoDaddy specific so I wasn’t 100% sure it work but what the heck. But it did. After following his instructions I had to change one word in my script as well as the login credentials and I was in like Flynn.

For posterity

So what I did was (all according to the above link):

ssh into the server — I had already set this up.

mkdir ~/bin

echo '#!/bin/bash'>~/.bash_profile
echo 'PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"'>>~/.bash_profile
chmod +x ~/.bash_profile

cd ~/bin
wget http://www.oerinet.net/files/godaddy_bin/rsync.gz
gunzip *.gz
chmod +x *

Grab the path

cd ~/bin
pwd

and edit the deploy script.

Abracadabra!

Sweet, sweet success

Apparently I could also install nano this way. I will have to grab his copy of the rsync and nano installers and store them somewhere. I am not sure if they are commonly available in single packages although I would guess they are…

Because “Everything is somewhere on the internet”…