What sort of def scaffolding do you mean? The benefits of just pulling the repo are that you can use ansible-pull to automatically update the servers whenever new code is merged to master, which would be more complicated if you had the CI server doing the pushing.
> What sort of def scaffolding do you mean?
version control software, to start with. perhaps more.
i guess my viewpoint is coloured as the last thing i was working on was deployed to client desktop machines. there was absolutely no way we were going to be pushing to those with version control.
if you are deploying to a server you own, i guess in principle you can do whatever you want. one of my colleagues rigged a build to create a debian package for the server-side version of the code we worked on. that took a bit of mucking about to get going but was very nice when it was set up.
Then you can just add/extend a job to create a release package, and deploy it.
Doesn't take that much effort, and lets you avoid infecting your production boxes with dev infrastructure/scaffolding, as `NickNameNick` suggests.