Re: recipe to use git for deployment

I always did "git pull" on the servers - but the history of my projects
is not that huge.. Thus I never cared.
Great: You can keep some server specific config settings and rebase
them - and you can do a fast git status to check whether file contents
have been modified (eg determine whether you've been hacked ..)

If you really care that much about history why not push a zip file using git archive --format=zip and unpack that on the deployment server instead?

For FTP access only this did a great job for small projects: https://github.com/MarcWeber/git-ftp (-> git-ftp-minimal.sh) It only copies changed files *and* checks whether they have been modified on the server first (detecting work of others). But that's probably not a good thing for automatic deployment.

Marc Weber