I came up with deliver https://github.com/gerhard/deliver to address this very problem. It's bash utility that automates git-based deploys and comes with pre-built strategies for the most common deployment scenarios: generated sites (think Jekyll), shared (WordPress, PHP etc.), ruby, node-js, S3 etc. I did a talk on it at my London Ruby User Group in March: https://speakerdeck.com/gerhardlazu/deliver
That's very cool. I really dig the minimalism of it. I'm currently using a system that involves about the same amount of config and leans on Capistrano for the heavy lifting, but I think I might investigate using deliver for my next project.
