Git Flow

The idea is to have one long-lived branch "master". On push to that branch, the code is deployed to the staging environment.

The production should be deployed on release publish.

Excalidraw diagram

Standard flow

The developer creates a short-lived branch from master, introduces some changes and then creates a pull request to master. For pr to be merged, the code should be reviewed and tested.

Possible jobs:

• unit tests
• e2e tests
• linting (eslint, stylelint, tsc --noEmit)

This code is deployed to staging. When the code is ready to be deployed to production, the developer creates a release and tags the commit that should be deployed to production.

Ooops, we need a hotfix

Imagine that we have a bug in production. We need to fix it asap. Meanwhile, the new feature is just being merged to master and not tested properly yet.

The developer should create a branch with a hotfix (hotfix/<name>) from the latest release tag. After that, in case the hotfix ready and the new feature is still not tested, the engineer should publish a release on a hotfix branch.

After that, the commit with the hotfix should be merged to master.

Major feature development

During the development we can have a situation when the feature requires a lot of time to be developed. Moreover, it should be validated by stakeholders and properly tested. So, we need to have a separate short-lived environment for that feature.

In this flow we have a convention that all branches with a major/ prefix are temporary environments for major features. So, the developer should create a branch with a major feature (major/<name>) from master. For every push in that branch the changes are automatically deployed to the temporary environment. When the feature is ready, the developer should create a pull request to master. After the pr is merged, the major/<name> branch should be deleted, which triggers the deletion of the temp environment.

Rollback to the previous release

In case we need to roll back to the previous release, we should manually trigger a prod deployment workflow with the previous release tag.

Secrets and variables

• WORKLOAD_IDENTITY_PROVIDER - GCP workload identity provider should be stored in secrets. Article
• SERVICE_ACCOUNT - GCP service account should be stored in secrets
• GCP_PROJECT_ID - GCP project id should be stored in variables ${{ vars.GCP_PROJECT_ID }} otherwise GitHub actions will mask the temporary environment URL