Set up prod/staging process

[eli8527]

Our goal is to set up an easy staging and production environment for us to quickly test and deploy changes. This would involve setting up a new Digital Ocean instance for us to work within and eventually migrate the production site over to #33.

Our ideal git flow would be to merge from a dev branch into staging into main.

• Create staging branch
• Create new DO instance and set up vhosts for staging.riversinstitute.org and riversinstitute.org / production.riversinstitute.org
• Point DNS records for staging.riversinstitute.org and production.riversinstitute.org to this
• Set up GH action for both staging and main that copies the contents of that branch via rsync or SFTP over to the correct folder in the DO vhost.
• Copy the contents of the content folder from current prod into each of the new vhosts. (and modify a script to run from command line to do so)

[oilstel]

I setup a new DO instance today. It's running Ubuntu 24.10/nginx. There's a server block for staging & production at etc/nginx/sites-available/riversinstitute.org that point to the following directories:

staging: /var/www/staging.riversinstitute.org
production: /var/www/riversinstitute.org

These each have a .git repo that tracks from their respective branches, staging and master.

Also a Github action is in place for staging, located at .github/workflows/deploy.yml

Todos:

• Email Rivers for DNS login
• Test master Github action deployment
• Write script that pulls /content from master to staging

[oilstel]

@eli8527 Andrea added me to the Godaddy account but I'm getting an error when switching the DNS record to the new server. Andrea was saying you also had access? Would it be possible to try on your side? For some reason Godaddy's chat system doesn't seem to be working. Possibly an outside the US issue.

The new server IP address is: 137.184.155.65

[eli8527]

@oilstel this is done! i forgot i had access to godaddy — thanks for the reminder.
https://dnschecker.org/#A/staging.riversinstitute.org

[oilstel]

@eli8527 thanks!

Staging is now in place at staging.riversinstitute.org

Also added a htpasswd login:
username: rivers
password: east-river-to-rotte