Basically, I currently have a very simple procedure for deploying software, it is called: git push, and I really want to be able to do that for my web applications as well.

I know that Rob Conery has talked about this in the past:

• http://blog.wekeroad.com/2009/11/23/deploying-a-web-application-with-git-and-ftp
• http://blog.wekeroad.com/danger-danger/git-and-dropbox-sitting-in-a-tree

And I know about Heroku and AppHarbor, that isn’t what I am talking about.

On my own server, I have a set of web application that I want to be able to update using git push.

Requirements:

• It has to be an explicit operation (pushing to a specific branch is okay).
• It can’t be something that happens periodically, I want to push, and as soon as possible, be able to see the changes. Waiting 5 minutes for the periodic check is going to be a non starter.
• It has to take into account local information (logs, data, etc).
• I have to be able to easily rollback.
• I don’t really care for things like migrations, those are handled by the application, or manually.

I specifically don’t care about actually building the code, I am perfectly fine with pushing binaries to the git repository.

At first I thought about simply making the site a git repository and just push there. But you can’t push to non bare repositories by default (and rightly so). When I gave it some more thought, I realized that there are more reasons to want to avoid that.

Any thoughts? Any existing solutions?