Deploy a project using Git push

I found this script on this site and it seems to work quite well.

1. Copy over your .git directory to your web server

2. On your local copy, modify your .git/config file and add your web server as a remote:

   [remote "production"]
       url = username@webserver:/path/to/htdocs/.git
   

3. On the server, replace .git/hooks/post-update with this file (in the answer below)

4. Add execute access to the file (again, on the server):

   chmod +x .git/hooks/post-update
   

5. Now, just locally push to your web server and it should automatically update the working copy:

   git push production
   

The way I do it is I have a bare Git repository on my deployment server where I push changes. Then I log in to the deployment server, change to the actual web server docs directory, and do a git pull. I don't use any hooks to try to do this automatically, that seems like more trouble than it's worth.

Sounds like you should have two copies on your server. A bare copy, that you can push/pull from, which your would push your changes when you're done, and then you would clone this into you web directory and set up a cronjob to update git pull from your web directory every day or so.

You could conceivably set up a git hook that when say a commit is made to say the "stable" branch it will pull the changes and apply them to the PHP site. The big downside is you won't have much control if something goes wrong and it will add time to your testing - but you can get an idea of how much work will be involved when you merge say your trunk branch into the stable branch to know how many conflicts you may run into. It will be important to keep an eye on any files that are site specific (eg. configuration files) unless you solely intend to only run the one site.

Alternatively have you looked into pushing the change to the site instead?

For information on git hooks see the githooks documentation.