Recommended deployment path for an institutional production instance

[raphael303]

Hi Ruben and everyone,

We are setting up formr for research use. We have a dedicated VM (Ubuntu 24.04) and installed formr_dev_docker in April 2026. The instance is currently empty — no studies, no participant data — so we can start over cleanly, and we would rather do that now than build on the wrong foundation.

Our checkout sits on master at v0.24.13-39-gce8a6d7f, so we are well behind. Since the instance is empty we plan to reinstall on a fixed release tag rather than migrate. A few questions before we do:

1. Which release is the current recommended stable one? We see both a v1.1.x and a v1.7.x tag line and are not sure which to pin.

2. Is formr_dev_docker an appropriate base for a production research instance, or is it strictly a development environment? INSTALLATION.md lists production requirements it does not cover (per-study subdomains, TLS-only, OpenCPU restriction, backups, replication), and we want to be clear about what we would need to build ourselves.

3. Is there a documented or recommended production deployment for institutional self-hosters, or a reference setup we should follow? Especially considering, enabling payed consulting from your side.

4. For future upgrades: what is the intended flow for the Atlas schema migrations (update.sh / db_atlas_apply.sh)? We read the v1.0.0 upgrade notes about OAuth token invalidation and want to plan properly.

5. Any advice on tracking a release tag versus master for a site that will host real studies?

Happy to write up whatever we end up doing if it would be useful to other university installations.

Thanks for the project — and for the very detailed changelog, which made it much easier to understand where we stand.