To push code changes to text servers I do this.

Seamless Git Deployment

We have a private Git running on a server somewhere which we consider our central repository. Inside the .git/hooks/post-recieve is the following:


#!/bin/bash

while read oldrev newrev ref
do
  branch=`echo $ref | cut -d/ -f3`

  if [ "master" == "$branch" ]; then
   echo "MASTER can't deploy anywhere yet"
  fi

  if [ "beta" == "$branch" ]; then
    echo "Deploying BETA branch to example1.com"
    unset GIT_DIR
    git push betaserver beta
    echo "Done deploying BETA branch"
  fi

  if [ "alpha" == "$branch" ]; then
    echo "Deploying ALPHA branch to example2.com"
    unset GIT_DIR
    git push  alphaserver alpha
    echo "Done deploying ALPHA branch"
  fi
done


So it basically does a git push to a different origin based on which branch was committed. This also assumes your central Git repository server has the SSH keys for the other servers it is pushing to. 

On each of the servers where code is pushed to we have this in .git/hooks/post-recieve:

#!/bin/sh
cd /path/to/the/root-folder/of-the-website || exit
unset GIT_DIR
git fetch --all
git reset --hard origin/beta
echo "example1.com deployed!"

php -q /path/to/some/other/script/that/should/run/index.php '';

So what we end up with is seamless deployments to our development servers. When code is committed to a branch and pushed, the server for that branch updates itself. That script that is fired off at the end is for minifying CSS and other weird tasks.