IFDM-153: Set up a staging site

[imonroe]

READY FOR REVIEW

Summary

• Here, we introduce a new development work flow. We add a dev branch, and we add scripts to deploy the dev branch to a secondary staging repo.

Review By (Date)

• When does this need to be reviewed by?

Criticality

• How critical is this PR on a 1-10 scale? See Severity Assessment.
• E.g., it affects one site, or every site and product?

Review Tasks

Setup tasks and/or behavior to test

1. Create a feature branch off dev (or 1.x for urgent fixes)
2. Open a PR targeting dev
3. After merge, deploy to staging and verify: git checkout dev && git pull && yarn deploy:staging
4. Once staging looks good, open a PR from dev into 1.x
5. After merge, deploy to production: git checkout 1.x && git pull && yarn deploy

The deploy scripts enforce branch — yarn deploy will fail if you're not on 1.x, and yarn deploy:staging will fail if you're not on dev.

Front End Validation

• Is the markup using the appropriate semantic tags and passes HTML validation?
• Cross-browser testing has been performed?
• Automated accessibility scans performed?
• Manual accessibility tests performed?
• Design is approved by @ user?

Backend / Functional Validation

Code

• Are the naming conventions following our standards?
• Does the code have sufficient inline comments?
• Is there anything in this code that would be hidden or hard to discover through the UI?
• Are there any code smells?
• Are tests provided? eg (unit, behat, or codeception)

Code security

• Are all forms properly sanitized?
• Any obvious security flaws or new areas for attack?

General

• Is there anything included in this PR that is not related to the problem it is trying to solve?
• Is the approach to the problem appropriate?

Affected Projects or Products

• Does this PR impact any particular projects, products, or modules?

Associated Issues and/or People

• JIRA ticket(s)
• Other PRs
• Any other contextual information that might be helpful (e.g., description of a bug that this PR fixes, new functionality that it adds, etc.)
• Anyone who should be notified? (@mention them here)

Resources

• AMP Tool
• Accessibility Manual Test Script
• HTML Validator
• Browserstack and link to Browserstack Credentials

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR introduces a two-environment GitHub Pages deployment workflow (production + staging) by adding a staging deploy command tied to the dev branch and configuring Next.js to support a staging basePath.

Changes:

• Parameterize scripts/check-branch.js so deploy scripts can enforce different allowed branches (1.x vs dev).
• Add build:staging and deploy:staging scripts to publish to a separate staging repo with a project basePath.
• Update README and deployment docs to describe the new staging + promotion workflow.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 5 out of 5 changed files in this pull request and generated 1 comment.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
scripts/check-branch.js	Makes branch enforcement configurable via CLI arg for prod vs staging deploys.
package.json	Adds staging build/deploy scripts and ensures dotfiles are published.
next.config.ts	Sets basePath from NEXT_BASE_PATH to support staging under a GitHub Pages project path.
README.md	Documents environments and the new dev → staging → prod promotion flow.
docs/deployment.md	Expands deployment docs for staging and production, including troubleshooting.

Comments suppressed due to low confidence (1)

scripts/check-branch.js:14

• check-branch.js currently fails open: if git rev-parse errors (e.g., not a git checkout, missing git, permissions), the script warns and allows the deploy/build to proceed. Since this script is explicitly used to enforce deploy branch restrictions, it should fail closed and stop the deploy when the branch cannot be determined.

try {
    const branch = execSync('git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD', { encoding: 'utf8' }).trim();

    if (branch !== allowedBranch) {
        console.error(`Deploy blocked: must be on branch '${allowedBranch}' (currently on '${branch}').`);
        process.exit(1);
    }
} catch (error) {
    console.warn('Could not determine git branch, proceeding with build...');
}

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