Git as a deployment strategy

[proggR]

I'm trying to think of the best way to deploy production updates for a website I'm working on. Right now I'm toying with the idea of using the master branch of a git repo for production. I would develop from a development branch and when it comes time to roll the updates into production I would make a staging branch from production and merge the develop branch into that, test and merge that into the master branch.

 

With that said, does anyone see any issues with this strategy? What security measured should be taken if this is the process that gets used? I would limit read/write access to known computers using an ssh key. Are there any other things to take into account if I were to use git over ftp for deployment?

 

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[trq]

I use a similar approach on a few projects without issue. I do however have update scripts that ensure no changes had been made (which they shouldn't have been anyway) within the production repo. There are usually a few other things that need to be scripted as well such as making sure permissions are correct and the the dist configs are copied into there correct location but yeah, overall, it works well.

[proggR]

Good to know, thanks. The place I work has a nightmare of a deployment strategy right now which got me thinking about how I will do it with my own projects. In the past I've just used FTP to copy my "staging" files to production but if I'm using git anyway during development I figured using the master branch for production made sense.

[trq]

I generally have a 'production' branch which my production servers track.