deployment - Git: auto pull from repository?

Question

Is there any way to set up git such that it listens for updates from a remote repo and will pull whenever something changes? The use case is I want to deploy a web app using git (so I get version control of the deployed application) but want to put the "central" git repo on Github rather than on the web server (Github's interface is just soooo nice).

Has anyone gotten this working? How does Heroku do it? My Google-fu is failing to give me any relevant results.

Answer 1

Git has "hooks", actions that can be executed after other actions. What you seem to be looking for is "post-receive hook". In the github admin, you can set up a post-receive url that will be hit (with a payload containing data about what was just pushed) everytime somebody pushes to your repo.

For what it's worth, I don't think auto-pull is a good idea -- what if something wrong was pushed to your branch ? I'd use a tool like capistrano (or an equivalent) for such things.