The problem
What is the best way to move source code around? I don’t know, but rsync works well. In the past I have been exposed to using the following technologies to deploy code :
Capistrano (if I remember correctly) got set up on one project and it was so super complicated that I didn’t do it again. I had a lot of success with git-ftp when it wasn’t being broken by a curl update.
Long story short, there is more than one way to skin a cat and rsync has skinned more cats than the others.
The solution
Rsync as a bunch of flags which all do really helpful things. My current favourite are -vzcaSlh. I was able to write a bash script which remembered all these flags and had an interface for managing connections per project. Authentication would be handled using SSH keys with the server details being stored using git config.
The end result had a CLI like the following :
$ git config deploy.staging.url username@serveraddress:/path/to/webroot/
$ deploy staging
# This is a dry run, it will show you the files it wants to shift but not shift them
$ deploy staging go
# This will run the deployment
$ cat .deploy-ignore
───────┬─────────────────────────
│ File: .deploy-ignore
───────┼─────────────────────────
1 │ node_modueles
───────┴─────────────────────────
I use this all day everyday and it has yet to let me down.