"git checkout X && git pull" ?

If I wanted to bring production down I'd just rm -rf / the database machines instead of using half-measures like that.

I'm just saying you don't need fancy CI-de-jour tech for a home project. If you're on the Atlassian stack Bamboo does pretty solid deployment/test/rollback. With a proper staging and QA environment even a large corp doesn't need much more than git.

I've never used Bamboo, so maybe that's the solution, but I disagree with your comment otherwise. No one should ever need to SSH to the servers to deploy things, and I would prefer to keep the hand-rolling to a minimum. Is there an OSS solution that will take care of that? Maybe Nomad would work.