Best practice for deployments to droplets

Hi guys,

I would like some advice on ‘best practice’ for deploying projects to a DigitalOcean Droplet.

I have a number of hobby projects that are compiled with Docker, either webpages built with Node.js or python API’s. My usually process is:

1. to clone the git repository to my Droplet
2. run ‘docker-compose up -d’
3. when I push changes to my repository, repeat the commands:
   1. git pull
   2. docker-compose up --build -d

I have recently automated step 3 with GitHub workflows.

The process has served me well without complaints when projects are small but I am now becoming more space conscious - my git repositories often include files that aren’t necessary for deployment.

So my question is: what is the best practice method for deploying projects compiled with Docker?

Some of my thoughts are:

• create a ‘deployment’ branch in my git repository that only contains the necessary deployment files. Although I don’t know how this would stay maintained with pull requests.
• pre-compile Docker containers and store them on Docker-Hub. Therefore only pulling and running containers to my Droplet, and not full repositories. I don’t know if Docker-Hub works in this way.
• does GitLab provide any services to help with this?

Am I going about this the right way? Any advise would be appreciated.