Operational Architecture

Operational Architecture

Sardine is where the site is managed; the public site is served elsewhere. Publication is a cycle, never a one-off export: edit in the panel → build → publish to the configured destination → the destination serves the public site → further changes republish to the same destination.

flowchart LR
    A[Admin panel<br/>editors, workflow, preview] --> B[(Editorial storage<br/>SQLite / PostgreSQL / MySQL / MSSQL)]
    B --> C[Deterministic build<br/>same content, same bytes]
    C --> D[Deployment target / provider<br/>host extras + transport]
    D --> E[Public hosting<br/>SWA, Nginx, S3, Pages, Netlify, …]
    E -.->|readers| F((Public site))
    A -->|republish after every change| C

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The five pieces

Piece	Role	Notes
Admin panel	Where content is created, edited, reviewed and published	Never needs to serve the public site; can live on a laptop or private network
Editorial storage	The working store behind the panel	Four engines, one conformance-tested contract; the portable JSON/Markdown export stays the source of truth
Build	Editorial state → static artifact	Deterministic: same content + same clock → identical bytes; validation gates publication
Deployment target / provider	Shapes and transports the artifact	Targets swa, nginx, generic and providers filesystem, swa bundled; extensions add destinations (sardine-target-<name>, sardine-deploy-<name>)
Public hosting	Serves the site	Azure Static Web Apps, your own Nginx, S3/CloudFront, GitHub Pages, Netlify, any static host

Provider phases

All five phases ship for two reference providers behind one contract: filesystem/Nginx (immutable releases, atomic symlink activation, health check with automatic rollback) and Azure Static Web Apps (authenticated upload, deployment tracking, health verification, rollback by re-sending a kept release; the token lives only in the environment). Publish, unpublish and scheduled windows deploy automatically; every operation is audited.

Providers resolve through a registry: [deploy] provider = "<name>" selects one, the contract version and interface are validated at selection time, and the panel adapts to each provider's declared capabilities. Extensions ship further destinations (S3, GitHub Pages, Netlify, SSH…) via Extension.deploy_providers with zero core changes — a conformance suite runs the contract's rules against any provider. Authoring guide and host-specific examples: the repository's docs/DEPLOYMENT.md.