How to upload/update theme from local - bitbucket - shared hosting?

Question

I am having tough time to figure out the best most appropriate way to maintain and update my custom theme for wordpress.

I have setup local server (wamp) with wordrpess where I mainly develop my theme and push everything to bitbucket. At this point I usually just upload my theme from my local machine to ftp server theme folder - and voilà! However, this seems like an old approach.

I see people talk more and more about dynamic update - push theme directly to host (from lets say bitbucket). I tried to search for best approach and a "how-to" tutorial however I failed.

My hosting is shared and does have ssh access. How to use all of this - no idea. Maybe someone could direct me to a tutorial?

Answer 1

In a nutshell there are two basic approaches to this:

1. Build elsewhere and upload (in one way or another) result to the target server
2. Do everything right on target server

There is variety of solutions that will do either of this or some mix of the two.

The simplest possible way for the conditions you had given (Bitbucket and server with Git) would be to:

1. Have Bitbucket make web hook call to your server.
2. Have server listen to the call and pull changes from specific deployable branch.

Personally I had used myWebHook with success for this scheme. It implements Bitbucket support so it only takes uploading it to server and bit of configuration to have it going.