Easy way to trigger off a reload of a service managed by Monit without having to become root. In my case, I’ve got a monit service called resque-worker, and I can restart it by just touching tmp/resque-restart.txt.

check file resque-restart.txt with path /path/to/your/app/tmp/resque-restart.txt
  if changed timestamp then
    exec "/usr/bin/monit restart resque-worker"

Ties in nicely with deploy tasks, and you don’t have to end up leaving root access SSH keypairs laying around.