Easy peezy deploy from a git repo using rsync

deploy.sh

#!/bin/sh

# heavily inspired by http://wildlyinaccurate.com/deploying-a-git-repository-to-a-remote-server (and comments)

ref=master                # git ref
prefix=deploy_in_prog/    # just a temp name
tmp_dir=/tmp
remote_dir=/var/www       # the remote directory
remote_host=user@host     # the remote host

echo "Deploying to $remote_dir..."

git archive --prefix=$prefix $ref | tar -x -C $tmp_dir | rsync $tmp_dir/$prefix --copy-links -av $remote_host:$remote_dir
rm -rf $tmp_dir/$prefix