This documents the current development (dev), staging, production (prod), and
Continuous Integration (CI) servers for the support.mozilla.com instance of
Kitsune.
This document will not detail how Kitsune is deployed, only why, when, and where.
All of the source code for Kitsune lives in a single Github repo. There are two important branches and we use tags.
The master branch is our main integration points. All new patches should be
based on the latest master (or rebased to it) and except for very rare
cases, all patches should land on master first. master never has code
freezes.
Our dev server runs master, and it
updates after every commit using a Github service hook.
The next branch provides a stable place for QA to test and verify changes
before they go to production. Every week, next is wiped out and re-branched
off the latest master.
Occasionally, patches need to land on next after this branch happens. They
should land on master first and then be cherry-picked (with
git cherry-pick) onto next.
Our staging server runs next, and
it is updated manually with a big red button.
Every week, we create a new tag for a release. The tags are the date the
release will go to production (e.g., the tag 2011-08-23 was pushed to prod
on 23 August 2011). Tags are created from the next branch.
Production runs the latest tagged version of Kitsune. It is typically updated on Tuesday afternoons, Pacific Time. Deployments to production are manually triggered.