Introduction

One of the advantages of using CloudCannon is being able to leverage workflows from Git when maintaining and updating your site. This guide will talk about the benefits of a staging workflow, then explore how to set this up in CloudCannon.

You can see a list of supported Git providers here.

What is a staging workflow#

In a staging workflow, you'll keep two Git branches to serve as production and staging environments.

• The production branch is what you'll show to your end users (visitors to your site). You won't ever edit this branch directly.
• The staging branch is where you make all your edits. When your changes are ready, you use Git to merge into the production branch.

Benefits of a staging workflow#

One of the most obvious advantages of this workflow is that it allows you to work on the site without your end users seeing any unfinished changes.

You can also set protections on your production Git branch to ensure it isn't merged to without appropriate quality assurance. You might require Pull Requests to be issued to your branch, and those Pull Requests might require a suite of automated tests to pass and/or approval from another team member before merging is possible.

Another benefit is that you can tailor each environment according to its use. If your production site has a long postbuild step for compressing images or translating content in another language, you can use environment variables to only run this step on the production branch.

if [[ $RUN_POSTBUILD == "true" ]];
then
    npm run postbuild
fi