[robenkleene]

I’d love to hear more specifics about what kind work you do. I saw Node, so I’m guessing backend Node development? Do you do front end too? If so, what’s your workflow for running a dev web server and accessing it from a browser?

[browsergrip]

Thanks Roben! :) Yes full stack, and the way I run most dev is to run it in the same server as production, but in another clone of the repo in a different directory, a different branch, and a dev port, like 6667. But keep the same certs TLS, and create a clone or dev version of the db. Then just access the same as normal but on the other port.

Occasionally, for like a larger project with load balancers, I'll run an entire dev single VPS with a subdomain of the production and use a wildcard TLS cert.

Then I can do whatever I like to the dev and production will be fine. Depending on situation, I might set it up blue-green and shift some traffic over from production and monitor and if it's ok, I push that to production. Or for larger projects, mirror the whole stack (two instance pools) and alternate production and dev, so I get continuous monitoring of the latest changes and I can roll back to the last stable version by traffic shifting if need be.

[robenkleene]

Got it, this really helpful. Lots of useful tips here, thanks!