I have a website that I work on locally and is hosted with a web host on another server. How would I use SSH to automatically push my local files to the production server? Would it possible to setup a list of files that are on my local machine that I do not want uploaded and can I have it upload only the files that have changes?
EDIT: Thanks for the replies, I actually just started using git today so I'll have to look into it.
I would use scp.
You could write a simple script to stage your upload files to certain directory (that way you exclude the other files), then push them to you server that way.
I use ssh and cvs. (the basic idea is there, just ignore the university specific stuff)
I check in my code on a regular basis, then I label it. On the webserver, I check out the latest label. It makes backing out super easy and updating super easy as well.
Then I never have to worry about files getting there that I don't want and because it is tunned via SSH it is totally secure.
Both the webserver and cvs server are linux boxes which really simplifies things.
Take a look at WinSCP as well.
Sounds like rsync would be a great tool for you to use. It can run over SSH and can figure out what has changed. You can tell it to ignore files as well.
As Rob Di Marco mentions, rsync is a great way to copy your files. Another option I've recently switched to is using git for this purpose, which also works over ssh and gives us version control.