More efficient deployment workflow

[olyism]

How might we create an efficient deployment workflow?

Current problems:

• public/ folder is not ignored
• Deployments to different release branches, seems a bit cumbersome

Some initial ideas:

• .gitignore public/ folder
• Find other hosts, not Github Pages

[olyism]

Due to Github Page's limitation of only deploying to master, this is my current resolution:

• master is for public files only. After the gh-pages deployment script is run, the static files will override all files in master
• development is the main branch
• new release branches are created for each new bundle of work. Release branches are named as release/VERSION_NAME, e.g. release/v1.4.2
• Feature branches branch off the respective release branch
• .gitignore ignores /public folder
• Once a release branch is completed, create PR back to development branch, add git tag of the merge commit
• Run deploy script 🚀

Note: this is the interim workflow whilst we're still using Github Pages. It seems like a good workflow, albeit cumbersome. We can look into a leaner process after we have another hosting environment.

[olyism]

Also, will need to fix the problem of Github Pages wiping out the custom domain setting.

Seems like the CNAME file must be in the root. See https://github.com/tschaub/gh-pages/issues/213