The serendipity between a grumpy thought and a terrible pun is almost impossible to ignore.
First off allow me to expand on my grumpy thought. Throughout my career I’ve been involved with a myriad of test, build, deploy, and release systems. The sort of thing that you would normally call build-monkey work, or release management, or DevOps, or whatever the hijacked term of art it is now. One way or another you want to get the code that was written by someone (please not something) into production in the most secure, safe, and dependable manner that you can. Companies have made millions selling these systems, security engineers have gone grey trying to protect them, and build monkeys have thrown a lot of banana-smelling stuff at anyone nearby because they had to deal with them. One of the incessant thoughts that have been bouncing around my brain has been that most of these systems can be uncharitably (but accurately) described as cron jobs with extra bits added.
In the spirit of replacing something big with a small shell script (which is a ThinkGeek t-shirt that I still own), in combination with the aforementioned terrible pun which should be obvious by now, I would like to introduce you to Cronan the Deployer. It really is a relatively small script (albeit in python) that can replace the giant hammer CI/CD systems most often only used for continuous build or deployment. It runs best as a cron job and can be hosted anywhere you can run git, python, and cron.
In any case, this is now out of my head, and into yours. Not sorry :)