xCloud's GitHub installer automatically deploys open-source projects like Free Scout with one click, detecting the app type and configuring PHP, MySQL, and environment files. A push-to-deploy webhook redeploys the site automatically when you publish new releases, trading automation for manual control.
Chapters
Xcloud has a super cool new streamlined GitHub installer, and I'm going to show you how it works. I'm on a brand new server here, and I went to add a new site, and one of my options here is deploy via Git. Now we have a couple of options here. I have already connected my my GitHub repo to xCloud, which means they know about my repositories. But we're not going to talk about that right now. I'm going to click here on public repository, and now you can either put in a URL or you can just search for something, and it searches GitHub. So I'm going to search for Free Scout, which is a Help Scout Open Source Clone. And there it is right at the top. And all I have to do is click it. And xCloud very cleverly detects the type of app. Now, it doesn't do this for absolutely every repo out there. If you wrote something weird and it was public, it wouldn't necessarily understand it. But things like Laravel, Node, Lovable, all of those things, it can detect those and figure out what you need for the site. I'm going to do a staging domain and call it Free Scout just because I can. My branch is dist. You could choose another one, but it detects from the repo which one is best. We're going to do a MySQL server and then quickly under advanced, I want to point this out. It chose PHP 7.1, which I don't recommend because the composer.json file in the project said it's PHP 7.1+. The plus is key there. So I'm going to choose 8.5. Then here's our database contact info. And then this is important. This is the .env file that comes with the repo. There's a lot of stuff in there. And then there's also a deploy script and it got all of that from the repo. I didn't have to do anything. Uh, so here's a quick summary. There's Free Scout, Laravel, there's my domain and I hit deploy. So here it is installing everything. All right, now the install is done. Let's visit our site. And there we have a Free Scout login. Free Scout's not configured, obviously, but it's all installed and ready to go. And all I had to do was search for it in the Git installer and away we go. Now I want to show you one more thing. There is a Git option here and we can turn on enable push to deploy. Now what this is gonna do is make it so that when there's a new release, it automatically deploys on your site. Whether or not you do that is a business decision. You may wanna do it manually and review things, or maybe you just wanna turn it on and have it run every time. So I'll save changes right there. And now anytime there's a new version, it auto-deploys. Right then because there's a webhook that detects it. So you stay right up to date all the time. So now installing basically any public repo on GitHub is really easy. You don't have to understand Laravel, which I don't, or Node or any number of things. You just search for it, click the installer, and away it goes.
