Easy deployment with git hooks

I use Git for managing this website. After commiting content locally, I push it to the remote side. Traditionally, then, I would ssh into remote and copy the repositories content somewhere under /var/www. This was before I found out about a very handy feature implemented in Git called "hooks".¹

Hooks can automate tasks, such as deploying the repositories content on the integration server when changes are pushed to the "live" branch. For this to work, the following script must be put in the hooks folder under .git (or directly under hooks if it's a --bare repository) and must be named post-receive.

#!/bin/sh

deploydir=/var/www

while read oldrev newrev refname
do
    branch=$(git rev-parse --symbolic --abbrev-ref $refname)
    if [ "$branch" == "master" ]
    then
        git --work-tree=$deploydir checkout -f $branch
    fi
done

Obviously, this is just one of many possible tasks that can be achieved with hooks.