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I am new to these commands. I am trying to gzip a local folder and unzip the same on the remote server. The thing is gzipping and unzip must happen on the fly. I tried many and one of the closest I believe is this:

tar cf dist.tar ~/Documents/projects/myproject/dist/ | ssh root@13.21.13.12:~/public_html/ "tar zx ~/Documents/projects/myproject/dist.tar"

As you can see above, I am trying to send out the dist folder to the remote server.. but before that I am trying to compress the folder on the fly (looks like that is not happening in above command).

• local folder: ~/Documents/projects/myproject/dist/
  


• remote folder: ~/public_html (directly deploying to live)

Ofcourse, the gzip created file must not be there.. it should happen on the fly (I am not sure how exactly to say this.. hope I am making sense).

My intention is to run the above like through a file like sh file.command. i.e I am trying to deploy my compiled project which is in dist folder, to live when the sh command is executed. I don't want to do this manually everytime I make the change in my project.

If you have rsync then use that instead, as it makes use of existing files to allow it to transfer only differences (that is, parts of files that are different):

rsync -az ~/Documents/projects/myproject/dist/ root@13.21.13.12:public_html/

Add the --delete flag to to completely overwrite the target directory tree each time. If you want to see what's going on, add -v.

If you don't have rsync, then this less efficient solution using tar will suffice:

( cd ~/Documents/projects/myproject/dist && tar czf - . ) |
 ssh root@13.21.13.12 'cd public_html && tar xzf -'

Notice that the writing and reading of the compressed tarball is via stdout and stdin (the - filename), and the -C is used to set the correct directory before processing. Add the v flag (on the receiving side) to see what's going on, i.e. tar xzvf ....

You are telling tar to write the tarball into the file dist.tar. With this command you are not sending the tarball to the remote machine.

You must make tar write its output to stdout using -f -. The hyphen means stdout. If you add a -z option, then tar will compress the tarball before writing it to stdout, which is a good idea in 99% of all use-cases where one sends a tarball to a remote machine.

On the remote side you extract with tar -x. In your example you have the -z option only on the remote side. This does not make sense. You must select the same compression method on both sides, i.e. use -z on both sides or don't use it on both sides.

This might work for you

tar -czf - ~/Documents/projects/myproject/dist/ | ssh root@13.21.13.12 "tar -C ~/public_html/ -xzf -"

(Disclaimer: I didn't try it out. It may contain errors.)

Since the remote tar is supposed to read the tarball from stdin, you don't provide a filename on this side too.

Instead of creating a file on disk, you need to send the output of tar to STDOUT, so it can then be sent over the wire using ssh:

$ tar -zcf - /path/to/files | ssh user@host "tar -zx - -C /path/to/destination"

Note the "-" characters where you are using file names. These tell tar on the sending side to write to STDOUT, and on the receiving side to read from STDIN. The archived data never gets written to the local disk.

You can't specify a path when logging in with ssh (at least, I've never figured out how to), so you need to tell tar on the receiving side where to write its output - that's what the -C /path/to/destination is for.

As currently written, the command would lead to files being written on the remote side nested in the local directories - you'd end up with

/path/to/files/index.html --> /path/to/destination/path/to/files/index.html

If, instead, you want /path/to/destination/index.html, say this:

$ tar -zcf - -C /path/to/files . | ssh user@host "tar -zx - -C /path/to/destination"