How to: Update live sites theme from version control repo via plugin or library? [closed]

Question

Maybe someone knows how i could update my live sites theme from a version control^*) project repository.

Point is that it's really time consuming if you got your theme hosted with version control (as an open source project), have a live site that uses the theme and maybe also make it available else where. Normally that means half an hour until you got everything running after you wrote an update/commited something.

I've seen it once that a server got a "live" update via a git project, but so far couldn't find out how this would be done.

Nice would be if there's a plugin out there that does this already. Libraries or similar are also ok.

^{*) The Q is about Github, Bitbucket, etc. and it also doesn't matter if the solution is git or svn based.}

Thank you!

Answer 1

I use a script called git-ftp, which simply uses FTP to push changes from a git repo onto a server.

Answer 2

I just made a tutorial on how to do a site update directly from github using a cloud server ( PHP application), in this demo I am using Engine Yard, but ther are other apps, it's pretty crazy what you can do these days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZEiFi4thDI&feature=feedlik

Answer 3

We are using Mercurial via Bitbucket, but same logic applies:

1. Clone repository to server.
2. Protect it from being web-accessed.
3. Create PHP script that will issue pull and update command to the repo.
4. Set up Bitbucket to ping PHP script on commit.

This is not quite "proper" deployment scheme, but it hugely streamlines workflow on development servers that need to fetch multiple different components from multiple repos.