the staging site
Pat, pat. And here’s a marvellous convenient place
for our rehearsal. This green plot shall be our
stage, this hawthorn-brake our tiring-house, and we
will do it in action as we will do it before the duke.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
This document describes the creation and configuration of a staging site for willshake.
1 motivation
A staging site is a kind of “rehearsal” area for a web site. And like theatrical rehearsals, staging sites can serve different purposes, from trying out new ideas to flushing out technical bugs.
For willshake, the staging site falls more on the “new ideas” end. Willshake is specially designed to support the addition and removal of features. Features may be in development for a long time before making it into production.
2 configuration
The staging site should be as close as possible to the production site.
All of the work that was done to make the live site easy to deploy, applies here.
Of course, the hostname will be different.
Should we even bother with an http staging site?
<VirtualHost *:80>
</VirtualHost>
In theory, you can do this by calling the one-time setup script with a different hostname.
server/one-time_setup staging.willshake.net
3 secure the staging site
Yeah, and add secure staging.
4 the staging site is private
I’ll privily away. I love the people,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes.
Measure for Measure
I’m not 100% decided on this. Part of the objective of the staging site is to be able to share incomplete features with people, to get feedback before they go into production. But there’s a risk in publishing what is in many ways a duplicate of the “real” site.
So certainly, the staging site must not be indexed. I somehow need to create a robots.txt that hides everything, but without ever letting it get to production.