Automating deployment with GitHub and SSH

GitHub's features go well beyond distributed version control in the cloud, which is amazing in itself. In the settings for each repository hosted on GitHub, there is a section entitled "Service Hooks". This provides an interface to automate a reaction every time a specified action takes place. For instance, you can effectively tell GitHub whenever I push to my remote master repository (the action) to do "something" (the reaction). In our case, that "something" will be to run a specific .PHP file on your remote Apache server that initiates a git pull from the same repository. The developer and blogger, Jeffrey Way, first documented this technique in an article and video he published (which you can access at http://goo.gl/qgFyg4) on the tutorial site tutsplus.com (which was formerly nettuts.com). We will explore configuring your remote Git repository for deployment whenever you complete a push to the remote master...