Simple default-safe rsync deployment script

deploy.sh

#!/bin/bash

# Will add --dry-run unless the --go option is set. All other arguments passed to rsync (e.g. --delete)
SOURCE=.
DEST=example.com:/var/www/mysite

DRYRUN="--dry-run"
args=()

for var in "$@"
do
    if [ $var == "--go" ]
    then
        DRYRUN=""
    else
        args=( "${args[@]}" "$var" )
    fi
done

/usr/bin/env rsync -azCcO --force --progress --exclude-from=rsync_exclude.txt $DRYRUN "${args[@]}" "$SOURCE" "$DEST"

This apes Symfony 1.4's deployment task, which is just a wrapper around rsync. Its most important feature is that it defaults to a dry-run, so you can run it to see the changes that will be made. The rsync options are configured to ignore file patterns listed in an rsync_exclude.txt file, and to perform a checksum match rather than a date & time match, in case you're deploying from a different working directory.

Before using it, modify the DEST variable to match your project. To actually perform the sync, add --go to the command (./deploy.sh --go). All other arguments are passed to rsync.

Obviously this is for relatively simple deployments. At the other end of the scale, Capifony is a powerful Ruby-based configurable solution for managing Symfony & Symfony2 deployments to multiple servers and can do stuff like provide atomic, reversible deployments, and run scripts (like database migrations, Composer update, or your test suite). If that's too complicated and this script is too simple, Anchour may suit you better.