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Droplinked ships every backend change through a dev-first flow with a manual production gate. Dev (dev.droplinked.com) and live (droplinked.com) always run the same code from the same branch — what diverges is when each environment redeploys.

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At a glance

PR merges to main
  ↓
Dev workflow auto-fires → dev.droplinked.com redeploys
  ↓
Smoke dev
  ↓
If green → operator clicks "Run workflow" on the main deploy
            in the GitHub Actions UI → droplinked.com redeploys
  ↓
Re-smoke live immediately
  ↓
If regression → instant rollback to last-known-good ECS revision
Nothing reaches live without a green dev smoke first. No exceptions.

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Why this flow exists

The droplinked-backend repo drives two ECS services:
  • A dev service backing dev.droplinked.com
  • A live service backing droplinked.com
These deploy from the same branch (main) so dev can actually validate live behavior. The dev workflow runs on every merge; the live workflow is workflow_dispatch-only — an operator manually triggers it after the dev smoke is green.
GitHub Environment protection rules with required reviewers would be the prettier solution but require a paid GitHub plan tier. The workflow_dispatch-only pattern is the no-cost equivalent.

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How to deploy a change

1

Open a PR against main

Wait for CI (verify) to pass. Request a reviewer + merge.
2

Wait for the dev deploy

Deploy ECS - Dev auto-fires on merge and completes in ~2–3 min.
3

Smoke dev

Hit dev.droplinked.com — log in, exercise the affected endpoint, anything the diff touches. Use a dev-only smoke merchant; never client accounts.
4

Promote to live

Go to Actions → Deploy ECS - main → Run workflow in the GitHub UI. Select branch main, click Run workflow.
5

Re-smoke live

Smoke droplinked.com immediately after the deploy completes. If a regression appears, revert the PR’s commit or roll back the ECS service to the previous task-definition revision before doing anything else.

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Emergency overrides

The workflow_dispatch trigger lets you select any branch when running a deploy manually — useful for hotfixes that haven’t merged yet.
Emergency live deploy (critical patch, can’t wait for the standard flow): Run Deploy ECS - main against the branch carrying the fix. Skip the dev smoke step but document the override in the post-incident notes. Emergency dev deploy of a non-main branch (testing an unmerged fix): Run Deploy ECS - Dev against the branch under test.