Configure staging and production environments with GitHub Actions and AWS Lambda

[McCarthyCode]

Currently, production code is manually tested and deployed via an AWS EC2 container, in "cowboy coding" style — there is no clear structure or reliable method of staging changes for deployment. Rather, the current process is simply pulling from each experimental issue branch, running docker compose down && docker compose up -d, and hoping things work. It's time to disjoin this staging behavior from production, and deploy in a better-structured manner.

This will involve:

1. Building release images outside of production — not on a live EC2 instance — with each release
2. Decoupling from EC2 — the ethereal workflow being proposed here is better suited for a serverless architecture (i.e. AWS Lambda)
3. Designing and launching an actual test suite for DevOps — feature tests are out of scope for this issue, but will be required soon
4. Writing a GitHub Actions YAML to define a pipeline that implements AWS Lambda instances to test each PR
5. Clearly defining environment variable definitions for DEVELOPMENT, STAGING, and PRODUCTION stages
6. Adhering to SDLC best-practices every step of the way

[McCarthyCode]

/oc create a PR for the first task above:

1. Building release images outside of production — not on a live EC2 instance — with each release

[opencode-agent]

Created PR #11

opencode session  |  github run

[McCarthyCode]

Hello, @EXDEV-oss, and welcome to my project! I'm thrilled that it caught your attention.

Are you currently building this for personal scaling, startup plans, or long-term launch?

Short answer: personal scaling. My primary intentions for this project (as a whole) are learning and exposure, and my objective for this particular ticket is to focus on the "ops" side of DevOps—infrastructure, automation, pipelines, unit/E2E tests, etc. It's big enough to classify as an "epic," in case you're familiar with GitLab terminology.

A comment works fine for quick hellos, but could we continue the conversation in a face-to-face meeting? I find chatting on camera much more effective than back-and-forth text conversations, and I'd prefer to keep the content of this thread focused on the project rather than networking of this sort.

Feel free to book a quick, casual chat with me to sync up—and that goes for anybody else reading this, too:

https://calendly.com/matt-mccarthycode/30min