Deployment to hosting provider

The resulting zipfile can be scp’d to the hosting provider and unzipped there.

Redirecting to latest beta

For cleaner links, we have a redirect in place from latest to the current beta deployment. Currently this is done manually. There is an .htaccess file in the hosted beta/ directory:

RewriteEngine   on
RewriteBase     "/beta/"
RewriteRule     "^latest/?$"  "build-gSHA/app/"  [R,L]

which can be updated after unzipping the deployment bundle. In future this mechanism will be automated or superseded.

Redirecting to current release

A release zipfile contains a file

releases/X.Y.Z/toplevel-dot-htaccess

ready to be used as a top-level .htaccess file. This is copied manually on the host, to keep a human in the loop for final deployment. This mechanism also allows rolling back to a previous release by re-copying an earlier release’s htaccess file.