Cool ok - understood.
The reason I'm pushing to do the entire process as part of a script is because I'm writing a Deploy Plugin for the Ember CLI: http://ember-cli-deploy.com/
These plugins all follow a standard pattern:
build -> deploy -> optionally "activate / set live"
To me, it seems like a great usecase for IPFS:
build -> ipfs.files.add & ipfs pin -> optionally ipns name ("activate / set live")
To conform to the plugin architecture model, the script needs to be able to separate the "deploy" and "activation" steps, and run one or both of them from the build machine (or CI). A remote VPS running a cron job means that the "activation" is handled remotely, and not something "triggerable" from the CLI plugin.
Thanks so much for everyone's input here! I absolutely understand the IPFS world a lot better now, and have everything I need to continue.
For those interested - I'm going to expose the "internal" IPFS HTTP API from the remote VPS node via NGINX, and protect it with a secret key that only the Deploy machine knows.
This way the deployer machine can control activations & pins over HTTPS, and thus conform to Ember CLI's plugin pattern!
I'll look into IPFS cluster down the track to add failover / distribution to the pinning machine.
Thanks again - excited to make Ember CLI Apps simple to deploy to IPFS!