I've been using Dreamhost.com for several years, hosting a few sites.

I've since used Heroku, and I've grown accustomed to being able to deploy code using Git. git push heroku master became a convenience I rely upon.

I wanted to be able to push to Dreamhost using Git. I was able to accomplish it by 1) creating a folder to push to, and 2) modifying the hooks/post-receive file in the .git folder on my Dreamhost account to deploy the site after pushing.

Create a folder to push to

Create a place to push your Git repo to in Dreamhost. For example, I created the folder ryanwold.com.git for the website ryanwold.com.

// on a Dreamhost VPS server

ryanwold.com             # where the Rails app lives
ryanwold.com.git        # the Git destination to push to

Modify hooks/post-receive to deploy after being pushed to

// in hooks/post-receive file, add:

#!/bin/sh
git --work-tree=/home/username/site.com --git-dir=/home/username/site.com.git checkout -f

cd /home/username/site.com
bundle install
touch tmp/restart.txt