Time lost on FTP file synchronization: solved

During my years of work as a web developer on a contract, I wasn’t to concerned about work optimization. I mean, I was, but there are always a couple new tasks on the way, so you just have to choose: switch to a new task or learn something new. As a pretty family guy, I have some obligations about making money, so most of the time my choice was to get to the next task.

But since I switched to my own web development business, work optimization has turned from something I’d like to do to something I have to do if I want to survive as a businessman.

So here is one of my last work optimization cases:

While working a lot with the code, you get to upload it to the live server all the time. Some times it’s pretty big parts, like new features, but most of the time it’s just tons of extra small fixes and adjustments. In that chain, one of the most time-consuming parts was not thinking about the solution or the implementation of some functional parts. It was a simple, endless upload of changed files to the server via FTP, again and again. It was an annoying and frustrating process to see how much time it takes to just go to FileZilla, select the needed files, press the ”upload” button, and wait until they get to the server. Time after time, minute after minute, at the end of the day, it might take up to 30 minutes in total each day. Huge part of the working time.

When you work as a contractor, your hours are paid, so there are not too many reasons to spend your own unpaid time looking for process optimisations. But as a business owner, you can’t afford such a dumb waste of my and my clients time and money. As we know, if some problem appears frequently enough, most of the time there should be a solution for that problem. So I started to find a solution to my problem (time lost during FTP file synchronisation).

And I found it quickly.

The solution is to set up an ”Auto Deployment" webhook. Webhooks allow you to build or set up integrations that subscribe to certain events on GitHub. When one of those events is triggered, the scenario will start. Webhooks can be used to deploy to your production server (detailed instructions from Hostinger are here).

Now, once needed code changes are made, all I do is execute a sequence of commands: git add, git commit, and git push. And ho-la-la, all my code changes automatically appear on a live server!

Now it takes 0 minutes instead of 30! Multiply it by 5 working days, and you get up to 2.5 hours of extra productive time each week.

The seeker shall find. I’m happy with this finding and super excited about those in the future.

Thanks for visiting, thanks for reading.