Production And Deploy Discipline

Live Verification

For production-facing changes, verify the live health endpoint.
Verify the intended user flow in the browser on the real domain when possible.
Check Sentry for fresh unresolved issues after changes that touched a live incident or cutover path.

Render deploys from the branch image build, not from git tags alone.
When syncing env vars from another environment into Render, treat RAILS_MASTER_KEY as branch-image specific.
For raw production restores on Render:
- restore the fresh production dump
- run branch schema migrations
- do not run data:migrate unless explicitly requested
- do not run subset normalization
- verify the target user can actually log in afterward
For sanitized subset restores:
- never present them as real production
- say so plainly if they are used for QA or screenshots

For Active Storage and R2 work, verify a sample of real blob keys, not just config values.
Before domain cutover:
- verify custom-domain health
- verify email/password login
- verify Google OAuth callback configuration
- verify mailer links and any touched host-based metadata

Treat stale frontend assets as a first-class deploy risk for active sessions.
Keep deploy-time recovery enabled for Vite preload and lazy-import chunk failures:
- auto-reload once
- fall back to a manual reload prompt if auto-reload already happened recently
Do not map runtime chunk/preload failures to product 404 UI.
For unexpected 401 responses right after deploy, verify session validity via /api/v1/users/_me once before forcing logout.