Staging Environment

The staging environment provides a production-like deployment for testing before releasing to production.

Details

Property	Value
URL	staging.the-shift.dev
Branch	stage
Replicas	1
Namespace	shift-platform-staging
Cluster	GKE shift-platform in us-central1
Storage	Convex (self-hosted, in-cluster)

Deployment

Pushing to the stage branch triggers an automatic deployment via GitHub Actions:

git push origin stage

The CI pipeline will:

1. Run lint and tests
2. Build the Docker image
3. Push to GCP Artifact Registry
4. Apply the staging Kustomize overlay (k8s/overlays/staging/)
5. Trigger a rollout in the shift-platform-staging namespace

Staging vs Production

Aspect	Staging	Production
URL	staging.the-shift.dev	app.the-shift.dev
Branch	stage	main
Replicas	1	2
Namespace	shift-platform-staging	shift-platform
Purpose	Pre-release validation	Live traffic

Verifying

After a deploy, verify the staging environment:

curl https://staging.the-shift.dev/healthz
# {"status":"ok","service":"shift-gateway"}

You can also point the CLI at staging:

shift-cli config set gateway-url https://staging.the-shift.dev
shift-cli status

Kustomize Overlay

The staging overlay (k8s/overlays/staging/) patches the base manifests with:

• 1 replica (instead of 2)
• NODE_ENV=staging
• Staging-specific hostname in the Ingress
• Staging namespace (shift-platform-staging)