Setup dev server and document promotion/release process

[reefdog]

Once upon a time we had a dev server, now we only have a prod. We need to clone prod to dev and set it up as a deployment stop on the way to production.

• [x] Clone prod server to dev
• [x] Configure dev as dev and with mailing list override guardrails (so we only send to ourselves)
• [x] Fire up dev and ensure it's scraping and sending
• [ ] Discuss and document release cycle standards
• [ ] Document deployment and promotion process

We may want to split some of those items off as further issues.

[slifty]

I've been doing some reading about this:

• The way to fully automated releases in open source projects
• How to set up an efficient development workflow with Git and CI/CD
• This isn't as directly relevant but: Conventional Commits

That second link is most relevant; I don't think we need to prioritize version numbers at this stage (though I admit I really like the idea of automatically generated versions via conventional commits)

Here is what I would propose:

1. We should set up continuous deployment that automatically deploys any commits to master to our staging (dev) server.
2. We should set up a mechanism that automatically deploys manually selected commit points to our production server.

The second item has a few possible implementation paths:

• Github offers a deployment API which we could use.
• We could have a "production" tag that we apply to commits that we want on production.
• We could create a "production" branch.

The benefit of a production branch is that we have the most control over what is deployed to production (e.g. could issue a hotfix to production even after a new feature has been pushed to master / staging). The negative of that branch is it is more complex and risks having two versions of the code if we are not diligent.

The benefit of using github's deployment API is that it has no impact on git history. The negative is that it's a bit more proprietary and that we also don't get the git history.

I'm leaning towards use of a production tag for our first implementation of this.