I’m the type of guy that likes control. I like to know how things are working so that when they break, and they will break, I know how to fix them. This can be a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because I think it makes me a better developer. I’ve never regretted learning something about the systems I work with. It’s bad because I generally don’t like systems that do stuff for me. Even though they may be saving me work.
Take Heroku for example. It can save a ton of time. But what happens when it breaks? What happens when it doesn’t support what I want to do? As far as I know, I still can’t write to the file system on Heroku. So I don’t use it for my projects. I manage my own VPS. It’s not that hard. Seriously.
Even though managing a VPS is relatively simple, it can make deploying more work that it has to be. Capistrano and other tools are way too much.
I’ve done dinosaur deploys for a long time. Push to some repo. SSH into my server, pull, and run any asset or bundling tasks I need.
That is until I started looking at post-receive hooks in Git. These are awesome and exactly what I need. I haven’t played with them yet, but I will be. I think I can squeeze in an hour or so to play tomorrow.
Here is one of the better articles on how post-receive hooks work when you host your own git repos.