staging and dev environments

[Regina Obe]

> On Thu, Sep 11, 2025 at 03:40:42AM -0400, Regina Obe wrote:
> >
> > Sandro Santilli wrote:
> > >
> > > Do we need to have 2 stages on OSGeo infrastructure ?
> >
> > I think we need both, but we definitely need one.
> >
> > Vicky uses dev for testing PHP changes like she had to do with the
> > root theme, some parts broke with upgrade to newer PHP and it would
> > only show under certain data updates and she was working on that for a
> while.
> >
> > Staging I used to use when I want everything exactly the same but need
> > to test a wordpress upgrade as upgrades sometimes breaks our theme and
> stuff.
> 
> I'll rephrase: do we need 2 stages in OSGeo infrastructure ( DNS/Ansible ) ?
> 
> DNS:
> 
>   *.staging.osgeo.org
>   *.dev.osgeo.org
> 

We can have just one is fine with me and we'd use it both for development and staging.  It is only an issue if we have two things going on at the same time.
E.g. we are trying to make major changes to the theme and also need to test upgrades for current.


Also as far as 

> Ansible:
> 
>   * ansible.osgeo.staging.cfg
>   * ansible.osgeo.dev.cfg (we don't currently have this)
> 
> > > Could we use "dev" only for tests on our local machines and
> > > "staging" for the online tests, following the Ansible environments ?
> >
> > But anyway for me a dev locally is pretty useless as I'm not on a Linux
> machine.
> 
> Will rephrase: could we use "dev" only for tests on the ansible control
> machine ?
> It could be a remote host, like osgeo4-ansible-dev.
> 
> > Using ansible is already annoying enough with my setup.
> 
> Annoys me too, often, but I'm still convinced it has many benefits so would
> like to make the experience less annoying, and improving clarity in how we
> call things may help with this, see also
> https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/3419
> 
> 
> --strk;
> 
>   Libre GIS consultant/developer 🎺
>   https://strk.kbt.io/services.html



I can't see a reason why I'd ever want a dev inside an even osgeo4-ansible-dev.  For two reasons

1) Remember we tried nested nesting nesting and last we tried it didn't work too well
Cause you need 3 levels of nesting for the local computer setup you were proposing.
This case we can probably work around by creating ansible-dev as a VM rather than as a container then I think the nesting issue goes away.

2) Wordpress without data is pretty useless for most development and even upgrade testing.  At least for whatever I care to test.
Same goes for discourse and all the other services we have, but in case of other services we run, we don't have our own custom code so they are mostly upgrade / configuration change testing.
Wordpress I think is the only one where we need to change code cause we have a custom theme with very custom code.