After much digging around on the net, I finally got rallyhat under version control AND using Capistrano. For the uninitiated, Capistrano is a tool for deploying your application. It's command-line driven, has hooks in it for version control (I keep my code in a Subversion repository, and has all sorts of cool little features to it.

I found a great tutorial on using Capistrano on media temple and then found another link that showed some tips for dealing with password prompts and such.

So now when I do my development work on my laptop, when I'm happy with the code I can push it up onto the live site with a series of commands. It even allows me to roll stuff back if I have to. I wish there was a tool this great written in PHP, but luckily you can use it with PHP or any other web-based scripting language. All Capistrano cares about is that your code is located in the right place. One of these days I'll put together the deployment script for pushing a PHP app as proof of concept.