Creating a development environment, Phase 2, documentation

[Aveline-art]

Dependency

• Feasibility: Creating a development environment for our website, Phase 1 #2251

Overview

As a developer, we are interested in creating environments for our websites that are friendly for the whole team to review. For this issue, we will document our findings from the feasibility tests on #2251 so that this information will be available to future maintainers of our separate environments.

Action Items

• Read the Resources/Instructions below to find links to information about how we are propagating data from one repository to another
• Write documentation that reflects the above mentioned process. Be sure to detail:
  • Programs that are used
  • Steps to perform the change propagation
  • Anything else of note
• This documentation can exist in a new wiki, an existing wiki, and even multiple wikis. Just make sure that the information is at an appropriate place.
  • Link to wiki: https://github.com/hackforla/website/wiki/Development-and-Production-Environments
• Ahead of a meeting, send the wiki links on slack, then discuss it at the next scheduled all-team meeting. If you cannot make it, ask a proxy to take your place.
  • Topics include:
    • What settings should be in the prod repo? For example, should people be able to create issues and make PRs?
    • Other topics, please add on.
• Make any additional edits needed to the wiki
  • Note: We are currently in the process of moving the old wiki to the new website-wiki repo, so we will not be making any changes or additions to the old wiki at this time. Thus, we will be adding wiki content through a different process now. Read How to Contribute to the Wiki
• Conduct further research into the details of how this technology could work
  • Can we still give volunteers appropriate credit?
  • How can we handle unaccepted changes?
  • Is it possible to only sync certain files/features?
• Get one of the Merge Team members or a Technical Lead to approve the documentation. See https://www.hackforla.org/projects/website
• Release dependency on Creating a development and UAT environment, Phase 3, admin tasks #2264

Resources/Instructions

This issue concerns creating new environments for the HackForLA website team. Documentation below will go into more details, but to briefly summarize, we want to transition from one environment to 2:

1. hackforla/website-prod - this environment will be a production environment, meaning code here is for a website made specifically with external clients in mind
2. hackforla/website-dev - this environment will be exactly like our current environment. As the issue taker, you should be familiar with how this works. The only difference is that changes here will be propagated to prod instead of reflecting on the website.

Notice how each of the environments are worded like a repository--because they are! For each environment, we are interested in hosting different versions of the website. We use GitHub pages as our host, which means that it is impossible for us to host three sites off of one repository. Therefore, the key to this issue is to find a method through which changes can be propagated from DEV -> Prod.

Development, testing, acceptance and production

Github actions to use:

• Git Sync Action
• Merge Branch
• Usage examples - https://github.com/blakes24/hflatest-dev2/tree/main/.github/workflows