STAGING.md

Staging Environment Documentation

This document provides information about the StellarKraal staging environment.

Deployment how-to: Step-by-step staging deploy, secrets, rollback, and verification are documented in docs/deployment/staging-deployment.md.

Overview

The staging environment is a mirror of the production environment used for final testing and validation before deployment to production.

Access Information

• Staging URL: https://staging.stellarkraal.com (Example)
• Backend API: https://api-staging.stellarkraal.com (Example)

Security & IP Allowlist

Access to the staging environment is restricted to the team via an IP Allowlist at the Load Balancer level.

Current Allowed IPs

The list of allowed IPs is managed via GitHub Actions variables (ALLOWED_IPS). To add your IP:

1. Update the ALLOWED_IPS variable in GitHub Repository Settings.
2. The next deployment to staging will apply the new allowlist.

CI/CD Pipeline

The staging environment is automatically updated whenever code is merged into the develop branch. The pipeline follows these steps:

1. Linting & Unit Tests: All tests must pass.
2. Infrastructure Provisioning: Terraform applies changes to the staging workspace.
3. Deployment: The latest application code is deployed to ECS Staging.
4. Notification: A Slack notification is sent upon success/failure.

Data Synchronization

The staging database is synchronized with production every Sunday at midnight.

• PII Masking: During synchronization, all Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is anonymized.
• Masking Logic: Refer to scripts/mask-pii.sql for the specific masking rules.

Terraform Management

The staging infrastructure is managed using Terraform Workspaces. To manage staging infrastructure locally:

cd terraform
terraform init
terraform workspace select staging
terraform plan -var="environment=staging"