Deploy Static
Before rolling out a release of Static to production, you must:
- Deploy the Static release to staging.
- Check that the deployment succeeded, for example by checking the last synced time in Argo CD).
- Wait 10 minutes.
- Check that the next Smokey run passes in staging. Ignore any Smokey run that started less than 5 minutes after the Static rollout, because it may have received responses cached before the rollout.
- Double-check that the homepage looks OK and click around a couple of pages on the site.
Why?
Static requires extra care when deploying, because serves partial pages (for example the header and footer) that are cached and reused by many of the frontend rendering apps via the Slimmer library.
Releases of Static are not automatically promoted to the staging and production environments. This is because:
- the smoke tests do not currently take into account the caching of Static’s responses by the frontend apps
- Static does not yet have sufficient test coverage
Why 10 minutes? Slimmer caches Static’s responses for up to 1 minute by default.
Argo CD polls GitHub for changes every 3 minutes. The rollout itself (within
Kubernetes) typically takes another minute. The HTTP cache-control: max-age
for most pages is 5 minutes. The smoke tests defeat the edge cache where
appropriate, so the last 5 minutes really only matters for manual testing.