On unix-likes you can create cron job that calls "git pull" (every day or every week or whatever) on your machine. On windows you could use task scheduler or "AT" command to do the same thing.
Git has "hooks", actions that can be executed after other actions. What you seem to be looking for is "post-receive hook". In the github admin, you can set up a post-receive url that will be hit (with a payload containing data about what was just pushed) everytime somebody pushes to your repo.
For what it's worth, I don't think auto-pull is a good idea -- what if something wrong was pushed to your branch ? I'd use a tool like capistrano (or an equivalent) for such things.
There are continuous integrations programs like Jenkins or Bamboo, which can detect commits and trigger operations like build, test, package and deploy. They do what you want, but they are heavy with dependencies, hard to configure and in the end they may use periodical check against git repository, which would have same effect like calling git pull by cron every minute.
I know this question is a bit old, but you can use the windows log and git to autopull your project using a webhook and php (assuming your project involves a webserver.
See my gist here :
https://gist.github.com/upggr/a6d92e2808e9628ebe0d01fd93569f4a
My solution was a bit creative. I noticed I could create a script under my username with a loop and git pull would work fine. But that, as pointed out by others, bring the question of running a lot of useless git pull every, say, 60 seconds.
So here the steps to a more delicate solution using webhooks:
deploy key: Go to your server and type:
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "deploy" to generate a new deploy key, no need write-permissions (read-only is safer). Copy the public key to your github repository settings, under "deploy key".
Webhook: Go to your repository settings and create a webhook. Lets assume the payload address is http://example.com/gitpull.php
Payload: create a php file with this code example bellow in it. The purpose of the payload is not to git pull but to warn the following script that a pull is necessary. Here the simple code:
Script: create a script in your preferred folder, say, /home/user/gitpull.sh with the following code:
gitpull.sh
#!/bin/bash
cd /home/user/www/example.com/repository
while true ; do
if [[ -f GITPULLMASTER ]] ; then
git pull > gitpull.log 2>&1
mv GITPULLMASTER GITPULLMASTER.`date +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S"`
fi
sleep 10
done
Detach: the last step is to run the script in detached mode, so you can log out and keep the script running in background.
There are 2 ways of doing that, the first is simpler and don't need screen software installed:
disown:
run ./gitpull.sh & to put it in background
then type disown -h %1 to detach and you can log out
screen:
run screen
run ./gitpull.sh
type control+a d to detach and you can log out
Conclusion
This solution is simple and you avoid messing with keys, passwords, permissions, sudo, root, etc., and also you prevent the script to flood your server with useless git pulls.
The way it works is that it checks if the file GITPULLMASTER exists; if not, back to sleep. Only if it exists, then do a git pull.
For our on-premises Windows test servers, we use Windows Task Scheduler tasks, set to run every 3 minutes, pulling from Bitbucket Cloud to repositories on those servers. While not instantaneous, it meets our needs, and has proven to be reliable.