The pattern that I've seen fairly often (and use myself) is to git pull into a "working copy" on the deployment target, but do a git archive/symlink to actually

The pattern that I've seen fairly often (and use myself) is to git pull into a "working copy" on the deployment target, but do a git archive/symlink to actually build the copy that's served (before doing the service restart). That gives you a more atomic process and several points to back out gracefully if something goes wrong, without having to worry about *.pyc files or any similar cruft.