How to clone/pull to a remote server?

Question

The company I work for uses a development life cycles with rolling updates for client's live products with the defect backlog updates. Other than command line I'm looking for something our team of developers can use to manage their bitbucket/github repos on our remote staging boxs and the live site as we use repo as our transport method with the product.

I'm not so concerned with cloning the repo for the fist time on the staging test box, or the live production box, but having developers log into the server to run a pull for each project daily can be tedious, especially for the Jr developers, and as the SWA for the team I would not mind removing direct access to said boxs by providing a decktop interface, or some other method to update them.

Before I roll my own desktop repo SSH client, I wanted to check if anyone else has an nice app (Mac preferred :P) they use, or a better method?

Answer 1

Bitbucket has "Web Hooks" that you can use for this kind of thing. I have a super simple php script that allows me to pull on remote servers. Just put this in a php file

<?php
shell_exec('git pull origin master');
?>

Then, on the Bitbucket website, go to the repository settings and select "Hooks". Add a POST hook that POSTs to the location of this file on your remote server. Now, whenever you push changes to your Bitbucket origin, the master branch will be updated on your server.

The obvious downside to this is that you need to have some public address for this php script to live at. Look through the other Hook options if this doesn't work for you. Github has a similar feature, never used it though.