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How to use staging
The staging server hosts a few different sites, all of which are under the information-architecture.org domain.
The interaction-design.org domain is reserved for production sites.
How to test your work on staging
Before you push work from your local development branch to staging, it's a good practice to check on Slack to see which sites are currently available. The free ones should have a "FREE" subject on the corresponding #errors--{env} channel. Please update the subject if you intend to make use of a staging site and don't forget to switch the subject back to "FREE" after you are done.
Deployment
You can use Deployer to deploy your work to staging. See the How to deploy guide for details.
Automatic database import
Every night staging sites are taken down for maintenance, the production database is imported from a dump and migrated. The goal is for the database on staging to closely reflect the state of the production database.
You can open the Scheduler on Forge to see the scheduled cron job that handles this process:
One issue that arises from using a production database dump on staging is that it references data that exists in the "live" environment of external services the application depends on (Stripe is a good example). For this reason a tools:db:prune-soft-deletes console command was developed. It prunes the database and limits the number of false positive errors that would otherwise be logged on staging.