Deploy to production

[ramonaspence]

In order to deploy this project to production, I'll work my way through this task list.

• Create new branch development
• Rename master branch, main
• Set Debug = False in conf/settings.py
• Edit environment variables for production
• Write basic test suite for API
• Decide what will be the "production" branch
• Write documentation to follow for each deployment of the production branch, main

I will be updating this task list to add items that I've missed.

[ramonaspence]

I have this in production on Heroku now. I want to decide whether (1) I use the Main branch for production, and make the Development branch the default OR (2) create a new "production" branch, and continue pushing changes to the Main branch.

The latter would mean reconfiguring Heroku slightly, while the former requires completely reconfiguring the branches (ie. make development default, protect main branch, edit documentation for pushing to development branch).

Right now there aren't many changes that have to be made in order to push to Production so I am leaning towards the second option because of that.

A helpful stack exchange question & answer

[ramonaspence]

Alright, I've decided that I'm going to use the main branch as the "development" branch. So developers will create a topic/feature branch to make changes in, and then create a pull request to merge those changes into the main branch. Once it's reviewed by me or a future organizer, it'll be merged into main.

When it's time to deploy a new version to production, the main branch will be merged into the production branch, where settings and environment variables will be edited for deployment. All tests should then be run and any failed tests should be addressed. Once all tests are passing, it will be necessary to build the react app with production environment variables (ie. npm run build).

Then the production branch can be pushed to Github and deployed to Heroku.