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