How do you folks iterate frontend changes in a fast, but still safe way?
I'd like to keep my site running all the time and deploy next version that I can safely test without users knowing about it. Once I tested new version on different devices and all looks fine I'd like to switch it to production one.
I'm not a frontend developer, so any hints, even a basic ones would help me. Like do you use feature flags? Do you have a copy of whole site under some hidden path?
Thanks!
Most folks solve this by deploying to a staging area that either be on a different domain or on a sub domain of your main application. That environment can have test credentials for 3rd party services, a totally different DB, etc.
This is probably more of a DevOps challenge than a front end challenge.
Feature flagging can be a good idea if you want to roll out to production but only show a certain feature or area of the application to certain users. This only partly solves your use case though as it’s often hard to totally separate a features code behind a flag.
Does that help? Happy to talk more in the comments.
Do you not run a local copy of your site on your computer?