Using rsync to push code to a server

Fri Sep 25 2020

Today I learned for the first time about rsync. I've always just been using scp to copy files to a server. Today when I was trying to figure out how to also delete files on the server that were deleted locally, I found out about rsync and how it's a much better alternative!

The nice thing about rsync is that it only sends the differences of the files over the network instead of copying over all of the data of each of the files every time. It also has a --delete option that deletes the files in the destination directory that aren't in the source.

Here is how I use rsync to sync a directory between my local machine and a remote host:

rsync --delete {{path/to/local_directory}} {{remote_host}}:{{path/to/remote_directory}}