I was in the same boat as you not too long ago. As the others have said, Capistrano really is the way to go. Out of the box, it's meant to work with rails projects, but if you tweak it a bit, it'll work fine with really any language/environment. You can try www.capify.org to get started. Beware though, the majority of documentation floating around is for the 1.x release. By v2, a lot of the configuration specific details were changed though and unfortunately if you are starting now, the 2.x docs are really lacking. There is an effort underway to bring them up to speed, but so far I haven't seen anything. Read the docs from the 1.x release, as enough of it still applies to 2.x.