Basically right now, when something gets pushed to main, it immediately goes to butlerjcr.com. This is not perfect, since this means that if something unknowingly goes wrong when it gets deployed, then the whole website goes down until we fix it.
Would it be useful to run a second "beta" version of the website, that we use when we want to test changes? It could be at beta.butlerjcr.com, or possibly just at a different port if that's easier to setup. Whatever the case I'm slightly conflicted on the idea and want to get more opinions.
Pros:
Allows us to test potentially breaking bugs before they get pushed live.
Allows us to test that our continuous deployment is working correctly (making sure we don't push anything that breaks the CD pipeline)
Means that we have a shared version of the site that we can mess about on.
It would allow us to decrease protections on the main branch, and instead create a production branch which has the stricter protections instead
Cons:
Could eat up resources on our VPS. It's not particularly powerful or anything and running two node instances could definitely lead to slowdown on the main site
Would also eat up storage space which isn't great since we only have ~96GB
There aren't that many things that break on the main site but not our local instances. Any issues like that is more an issue of us not testing things first
A lot of the things that do affect the main site only (such as http2, SSL), may not be testable on the beta site, especially if we're operating it on a different port.
Our site doesn't really have any "high uptime" requirements. It's fairly okay for the site to go out for 30m or so on a quiet time of day, so pushing bad commits isn't actually a massive issue
Description of discussion topic
Basically right now, when something gets pushed to main, it immediately goes to butlerjcr.com. This is not perfect, since this means that if something unknowingly goes wrong when it gets deployed, then the whole website goes down until we fix it.
Would it be useful to run a second "beta" version of the website, that we use when we want to test changes? It could be at
beta.butlerjcr.com, or possibly just at a different port if that's easier to setup. Whatever the case I'm slightly conflicted on the idea and want to get more opinions.Pros:
productionbranch which has the stricter protections insteadCons:
Let me know what you think!