adr-sml/docs/06-deployment.md

06 — Deployment and cutover

Authority: AGENTS.md §3 D3 as amended 2026-08-26 (git + Gitea Actions → existing S3/CloudFront) and D11 (build everything, one clean cutover). Existing infrastructure: AGENTS.md §7 is authoritative. docs/reference/AWS-Hosting-Guide.md records how that infrastructure was originally built — it is a historical record carrying a do-not-execute banner, not a procedure, and §7 wins wherever the two disagree (Q24).

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Topology

Gitea push to main
  └─ Gitea Actions (act_runner)
       ├─ npm ci && npm run build        → ./dist
       ├─ static scoped IAM user key      (from Gitea secrets — NOT OIDC)
       ├─ aws s3 sync ./dist s3://<bucket>   (three passes, see Cache policy)
       └─ cloudfront create-invalidation
Namecheap DNS → CloudFront → S3 (OAC)
API Gateway → Lambda → DynamoDB / SES     (intake, unchanged path)

DNS is at Namecheap, not Route 53 [verified 2026-08-25]. Nothing in the pipeline touches DNS. Certificate renewal is ACM-automatic as long as the validation CNAME stays in place at Namecheap — do not delete it.

Today, deploys run locally

npm run deploy (scripts/deploy-local.sh) is the current path. It runs the same guard, the same three sync passes in the same order with the same cache headers, and the same invalidation as the workflow — at this scale the pipeline changes only how a deploy is triggered, not what it does. Treat the script and the workflow as one artefact in two places: change one, change both.

One thing blocks the workflow, and it is not a fact to look up:

• Actions are not enabled and no runner is registered (Q23). The Gitea instance is jointly administered, so both need its second administrator.

✅ adr-sml-deploy EXISTS — created 2026-08-26, Q22 closed 2026-08-28. DO NOT CREATE IT. This bullet said "adr-sml-deploy does not exist — aws iam get-user returns NoSuchEntity… Create it from Create the user below" until 2026-08-28, and an operator following it would have created a second IAM user, or hand-provisioned one with a different scope from the adr-sml-deploy-minimal policy §7 now records. §7 carries the inventory and the eight simulate-principal-policy results.

Found by adversarial-reviewer: the Q22 flip to PROVISIONED was swept in AGENTS.md and nowhere else, and the Change Log entry's sweep block covered the copy corrections only. Same shape as the SES-DKIM inversion — the stale copy instructed an action against a High-risk credential.

Create the user below is retained as the record of how it was provisioned, not as an instruction. Read it that way.

The script refuses to run as user/pouya — the broadly-permissioned personal user that has been authenticating to this account. See §10.

CI runs on Gitea, not GitHub

AGENTS.md D3 as amended, 2026-08-26: self-hosted Gitea. The instance, version, and repository are recorded in §7 — the version is comfortably above the floor for the vars context, so the first-step guard is belt-and-braces rather than load-bearing.

The live pipeline is .gitea/workflows/deploy.yml. Gitea Actions speaks GitHub Actions syntax, so it is a near-direct port — the build steps, the three-pass sync, and the cache headers are unchanged. The GitHub Actions original, with its OIDC role assumption, stays in the repo as docs/reference/github-actions-oidc.yml.example — deliberately outside .github/workflows/, because Gitea falls back to that directory when .gitea/workflows is absent.

The one real difference: no OIDC

Gitea is not an AWS OIDC provider. There is no role to assume, so deploys authenticate with a scoped IAM user whose access key lives only in the repository's Gitea secrets.

This is a genuine step down in security from an OIDC setup — which was designed here but never built — and it should be treated as one. The mitigations are the policy scope and the rotation schedule.

Create the user:

1. IAM → Users → adr-sml-deploy. Programmatic access only — no console password, no MFA device, no group membership.
2. Attach this inline policy and nothing else. Substitute the real bucket name, account ID, and distribution ID from scripts/aws-discover.sh:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "ListSiteBucket",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": "s3:ListBucket",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET_NAME"
    },
    {
      "Sid": "WriteSiteObjects",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": ["s3:PutObject", "s3:DeleteObject"],
      "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET_NAME/*"
    },
    {
      "Sid": "InvalidateOneDistribution",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": "cloudfront:CreateInvalidation",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:cloudfront::ACCOUNT_ID:distribution/DISTRIBUTION_ID"
    }
  ]
}

Four actions on one bucket and one distribution. No Action: "*", no Resource: "*" — the only wildcard is BUCKET_NAME/*, which scopes to the objects of that one bucket. s3:PutObjectAcl was dropped on 2026-08-26: aws s3 sync does not use it without --acl, and it is inert under Origin Access Control with ACLs disabled. If a deploy step needs a permission this policy lacks, the correct response is to question the step, not to widen the policy.

3. Create an access key. Copy it once — AWS will not show the secret again.

s3:AbortMultipartUpload is deliberately absent, and here is the actual reason. aws s3 sync switches to multipart above its 8 MB multipart_threshold; an interrupted multipart upload then cannot clean up its own parts, and orphaned parts accrue storage charges that do not appear in the bucket listing. What makes that safe today is simply that nothing here comes close to 8 MB — the largest file the pipeline uploads is well under it. The biggest source asset is src/assets/pouya-lajevardi.jpg at 357,627 bytes [verified 2026-08-26 — stat], Astro emits it smaller still after AVIF/WebP conversion, and the self-hosted font files are smaller again. Re-measure ./dist after the first successful build — that, not the repository, is what gets synced. No lifecycle rule exists; do not describe one as the mitigation, because it is not there.

Revisit if any single asset approaches 8 MB — a video, a large PDF, an un-optimised photograph. At that point either add an S3 lifecycle rule aborting incomplete multipart uploads after 7 days (preferred — it costs no IAM permission), or grant s3:AbortMultipartUpload on BUCKET_NAME/*.

Gitea configuration

Repository → Settings → Actions → Secrets:

Name	Value
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID	from the IAM user
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY	from the IAM user

Repository → Settings → Actions → Variables — not secrets. These are not sensitive, and keeping them as variables means they appear in run logs where they are useful for debugging.

Variable	Value
AWS_REGION	AGENTS.md §7 — Region
S3_BUCKET	§7 — S3 bucket
CLOUDFRONT_DISTRIBUTION_ID	§7 — CloudFront
INTAKE_ENDPOINT	§7 — Intake API
BOOKING_URL	(empty — parked, R6)

The same four values fill the IAM policy's BUCKET_NAME, ACCOUNT_ID and DISTRIBUTION_ID placeholders. They are deliberately not restated here — §7 is the single source of truth for operational facts, and the copy that goes stale is always the one nobody re-reads. scripts/aws-discover.sh regenerates them from AWS if §7 ever needs re-verifying.

Read this before creating the key. The AWS account is not a single-project account: it is shared with several unrelated sites and with a bucket whose name indicates another business's production client-database backups. AGENTS.md §10 has the specifics and the account identifier; they are kept there rather than repeated here. A static deploy key for a marketing site lives in that same account, and the scoped policy is what keeps a compromised Gitea runner from reaching any of it. Do not widen it, and never put the user/pouya credentials in CI.

A runner must exist

Gitea Actions needs act_runner registered to this repository or its organisation, and Actions enabled both site-wide in app.ini ([actions] ENABLED = true) and per-repository. Without a runner the workflow queues silently and never runs — which looks exactly like a broken pipeline.

The workflow installs the AWS CLI if the runner image lacks it, and runs aws sts get-caller-identity before touching anything. That check is narrower than it looks: sts:GetCallerIdentity requires no IAM permission at all, so it succeeds for any valid key regardless of policy. It catches a missing, malformed, or revoked key; it does not catch an under-scoped policy, which still fails halfway through a sync and leaves the bucket partially updated. Read it as a key check, not a permissions check.

The variable guard runs first

The workflow's first step — before checkout, before the build, before any AWS call — fails the run if AWS_REGION, S3_BUCKET, or CLOUDFRONT_DISTRIBUTION_ID is empty.

This exists because Gitea only added the vars context in 1.21. On an older instance every ${{ vars.* }} interpolates to an empty string with no warning, the sync target becomes s3://, and the run dies halfway through with an error that names nothing useful. The guard converts that into a clean failure that says which variable is missing — on every Gitea version. A recorded version number would have gone stale; the guard does not.

Key rotation — an operational obligation

Rotate adr-sml-deploy quarterly. OIDC would have made this unnecessary; with a static key it is a standing task:

1. Create a second access key on the same user.
2. Update the Gitea secrets.
3. Run the workflow and confirm it succeeds.
4. Delete the old key. Rotation that leaves the old key active is not rotation.

Set a calendar reminder. A key that is never rotated is the failure mode this whole section exists to bound.

Finding the AWS identifiers

scripts/aws-discover.sh re-collects the inventory — bucket, distribution ID, regions, API endpoint, certificate, SES identities, and whether S3 versioning is on. Read-only; no call creates or mutates anything.

chmod +x scripts/aws-discover.sh
./scripts/aws-discover.sh > aws-inventory.txt

The output contains resource names and IDs but no secrets.

Why OIDC would have been better — and why it is unavailable

Do not execute this section. It describes the design that was rejected because Gitea cannot support it. The live procedure is Create the user above. Nothing here should be created in AWS. Following it would add an unused GitHub federation trust to the shared AWS account (AGENTS.md §10).

A static AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID never expires, is invisible once set, and grants its permissions to anyone who can reach the repository. OIDC issues a short-lived token per run, scoped to one repository and one branch — strictly better, and the reason the rotation schedule above is not optional here.

It needs an identity provider AWS will federate with. GitHub and GitLab both publish one; Gitea and Forgejo do not, so there is nothing for AWS to trust and no role to assume. That is the whole of the constraint (D3 as amended).

If the project ever moves to GitHub, the workflow to adopt is docs/reference/github-actions-oidc.yml.example, and the setup is: register token.actions.githubusercontent.com as an IAM OIDC provider with audience sts.amazonaws.com; create a role trusting it, conditioned on the sub claim matching the repository and refs/heads/main; attach the same four-action policy given above; then delete adr-sml-deploy and its key.

Cache policy

The mistake to avoid is caching HTML aggressively — a stale index page is a site that does not update.

Pattern	Cache-Control
*.html	public, max-age=0, must-revalidate
/_astro/* (hashed)	public, max-age=31536000, immutable
Fonts	public, max-age=31536000, immutable
Images	public, max-age=604800
robots.txt, sitemap*.xml	public, max-age=0, must-revalidate

Sync in three passes, in this order: hashed assets and fonts with the long TTL, then images, then everything else. Uploading HTML last means a user never fetches a new page whose assets have not landed yet.

Two ordering dependencies are load-bearing and easy to break:

• Pass 3 re-walks the whole tree; the image headers from pass 2 survive only because aws s3 sync skips objects it has just uploaded. Reordering the passes silently overwrites them with the HTML header.
• Pass 3's --exclude "_astro/*" --exclude "fonts/*" also excludes those prefixes from --delete, so hashed assets from previous deploys are kept deliberately — pages still in a browser cache need them. Do not "fix" it.

robots.txt and sitemap*.xml fall through to pass 3 and get the HTML header. That is the intended behaviour: both should be re-fetched, and the table above records what the pipeline actually does rather than an unimplemented ideal.

Invalidate /* on deploy. At this traffic volume the cost is nil, and partial invalidation paths are a reliable source of confusing bugs.

CloudFront configuration

• Origin: S3 with Origin Access Control, bucket not public. Verify the bucket policy grants access only to the CloudFront distribution's OAC principal and to nothing else, and that public access is still blocked.
• Redirect HTTP → HTTPS. TLS 1.2 minimum.
• Default root object index.html.
• Custom error response: 404 → /404.html with response code 404, not 200. Returning 200 for a missing page tells crawlers every bad URL is real content, and it is the single most common misconfiguration in this stack.
• Compression on. Response-headers policy from 05-backend-spec.md.
• A CloudFront Function for trailing-slash normalisation, so /about and /about/ do not both resolve as separate indexable URLs.

Branch model

main is production; a push to main is what triggers a deploy. Work on short-lived branches, open a PR, merge.

The CI pipeline has never run. Not for want of a lockfile — npm ci, astro check and astro build all work now — but because the deploy user does not exist (Q22) and Actions are not enabled with a runner registered (Q23). Treat "every push deploys" as the design; today the path is npm run deploy.

Pull request checks — planned, not implemented: npm run build · astro check · lint · Lighthouse CI against the budgets in 04-seo-spec.md · link check. .gitea/workflows/deploy.yml has no pull_request trigger (only push on main and workflow_dispatch), so nothing gates a merge today. npm run build, npm run check and npm run lint all run clean locally.

Lighthouse is still not one of the checks that can be wired — and the reason changed on 2026-08-31. npm run lighthouse exists again (step 7a, AGENTS.md §7), so the blocker is no longer a missing script: it is that standalone Lighthouse drives an installed browser and the runner has none. Wiring it would need Chrome on the act_runner host (Q23). Wire the other four; do not write a workflow step that shells out to a browser that is not there. The gate lives locally and on the cutover checklist below.

Tag every production deploy v<year>.<n> so a rollback has something to name.

Rollback

1. Re-run the workflow at the last good tag, or
2. git revert and push, or
3. Restore from S3 object versioning — already Enabled on the site bucket (AGENTS.md §7). It is the difference between a rollback and a rebuild; do not turn it off.

Then invalidate /*.

Cutover checklist — D11 is a single shot, so run all of it

Content and compliance

⚠️ THE FIRST TWO ITEMS ARE THE PROJECT'S ONLY FULL CLAIMS PASS — D20, Pouya, 2026-08-30. claims-auditor no longer runs per build step; /build Phase 3 is adversarial-reviewer alone. Everything the register is meant to prevent therefore lands here. AGENTS.md D20 records both the reasoning and what deferring it costs — read it before treating either item as a formality, and do not tick one because npm run check:claims is green. That script is a greppable tripwire; it cannot read a page.

• claims-auditor run over EVERY page in dist/, findings resolved. This is the project's only full claims pass. Nothing publishes until it is clean. Not per-page in isolation — the pass exists here because the defects worth catching late are the ones that only exist once the pages sit next to each other. Give it the whole built site and the reading order a visitor takes.
• Pouya has read every page against AGENTS.md §4. The human pass. It is the other half of D20 and it is not delegable — his reading is what the per-step audit was traded for.
• Memberships RE-CONFIRMED AGAIN, on the day of cutover — AGENTS.md §12 R10, which is now an event trigger and cutover is one of its two events. Q44 closed 2026-08-28 and the group is published on /about/ (ADRIC, ADRIO, the three OBA sections, the CTF, [verified 2026-08-28 — Pouya]), so this item is no longer "publish them" — it is "ask him again, then re-stamp §4 with the cutover date." Pouya declined renewal-date tracking, which is exactly why this sits on the checklist: there is no date on which anyone would otherwise re-check. OCNI lapsed quietly and §4 records it as "not current, do not publish" — found roughly a year late. A stamp is not a renewal receipt. Do NOT add a currency sentence to the page while you are here — his ruling is "list the memberships; promise nothing about their future state", and the struck sentence stays struck. memberOf IS EMITTED on /about/ — Q53 answered 2026-08-28 and the withholding is dropped, so the graph asserts the same four memberships the page shows. This item therefore covers both: re-confirming before cutover means src/data/schema.ts as well as the visible list, and they must not be allowed to diverge. §4 records yearly renewal for the OBA sections and the CTF only — it says nothing about ADRIC's or ADRIO's period, and an earlier version of this line asserted "all renew yearly", which §4 does not support.
• The OBA sections stay listed; the LSO stays out — a check that nobody has tidied the two into one list, not an open question. AGENTS.md Q51 answered 2026-08-28: the Law Society is the regulator, so membership is licensure; the OBA is a voluntary association, which admits members it does not license. Structural, and independent of eligibility details — which is what made the question unanswerable inside this repo before the ruling. R1 is still live: same page, same subject, different question
• No TODO(pouya) remains in any shipped page
• No matter counts, rates, dollar figures, or testimonials anywhere
• Q.Arb described as held everywhere it appears — Q.Arb (ADRIC / ADRIO), no acquisition date. Every stage form is barred: "commenced", "in progress", "pathway", "not yet" (amended 2026-08-29). npm run check:claims enforces the stage words and a date near the designation, on dist/, in both deploy paths. It cannot catch a stage expressed without naming the designation; that gap is claims-auditor's to close, and it is stated in the pattern itself
• C.Med-Arb appears nowhere in dist/ — struck entirely 2026-08-29
• /fees/ carries the rates confirmed in D14 and docs/07-fees.md, or the page does not ship. And the reservation sentence sits adjacent to the overtime row — Q59, ruled 2026-08-31: a reader who takes the $500 and skips "a full day reserves the day; half-day overtime is subject to availability" has read a different offer, and the arithmetic then makes the full-day rate look strictly worse
• Privacy policy matches the backend as actually built. Three of its statements are derived and cannot drift — the collected-data list from INTAKE_FIELDS, the retention period from the handler's own figure, the analytics paragraph from ANALYTICS.installed. If analytics are installed, that flag flips and the policy's last-updated date moves on the same build; a policy naming a processor that processes nothing is a false disclosure
• /insights/ — check which state it is in. While no article is published the page emits noindex (derived from the collection) and SiteHeader keeps Insights out of the primary nav until two are live. Both clear themselves on publication. D9 means the flip is Pouya's: src/content.config.ts refuses draft: false without reviewedByPouya: true
• The five drafted articles are draft: true and therefore invisible to check:claims, which reads dist/. They were checked once, on 2026-08-31, by temporarily publishing all five and running it — clean on 27 pages. Re-run it that way before any of them publishes, because a draft that changes in between is unchecked

Technical

• npm run lighthouse on the full built site, from a machine with Chrome — it is not in CI and cannot be (see above). Read the exit status. Every category ≥ 95 on every page; the accessibility figure is measured with prefers-reduced-motion forced and that qualification is reported with it (AGENTS.md §7)
• Every page renders fully with JavaScript disabled
• curl of each URL returns real content, not a shell
• All internal links resolve; no orphan pages
• Sitemap generated and correct; robots.txt served, not 403
• Rich Results Test passes; OG previews render in LinkedIn and Slack
• npm run og:proof — every page's og:image resolves to a file in dist/, and every generated card's headline is its page's own <h1>. R15 is discharged (step 7b) so this is a regression check rather than a blocker on the interim; it stays on the list because a broken preview image is invisible from inside the repo, and because card text cannot be reached by check:claims. Run npm run og:proof -- --sheet and look at the contact sheet as well — the check compares strings, not rendering
• 404 returns a 404 status
• Security headers present (securityheaders.com A or better)
• SES identities verified for sending — confirmed 2026-08-26, re-check at cutover: aws sesv2 get-email-identity --email-identity smlcompany.ca and confirm VerifiedForSendingStatus: true
• SES bounce/complaint alarms actually notify someone — AGENTS.md §7 records the ses-alerts email subscription as pending confirmation, and an unconfirmed SNS subscription drops every message. Confirm it, then aws sns list-subscriptions-by-topic and check the ARN is not PendingConfirmation. (SES production access itself is granted — Q19 closed.)
• THE INTAKE FORM DOES NOT WORK YET, AND THREE THINGS HAVE TO HAPPEN BEFORE IT DOES — build step 8 shipped the page and not the pipe. 1. A CloudFront behaviour routing /api/* to the HTTP API origin AGENTS.md §7 records. The form posts to the same-origin path /api/intake — deliberately, so the CSP can be form-action 'self', so there is no cross-origin POST, so the endpoint id stays out of the HTML, and so submitting the form from a laptop does nothing. Without this behaviour the form 404s. 2. Deploy backend/intake/handler.mjs + backend/intake/fields.mjs, replacing the hand-built adr-intake-handler §7 records. It needs INTAKE_TABLE, SITE_ORIGIN, NOTIFY_TO, MAIL_FROM and RESPONSE_TIME set; it throws at cold start on any missing one, on purpose. RESPONSE_TIME must be CONTACT.responseTime verbatim — it is a public commitment (§4, Q27) and must read identically on /contact/, in the confirmation email, and in the bio. 3. API Gateway throttling, 5 requests / 5 minutes per source IP (docs/05). Not expressible in handler code, and it is carrying load the unimplementable 3-second timing check was specified to carry — see docs/05 §Three deviations.
• DYNAMODB TTL ENABLED ON THE TABLE, AND VERIFIED BY A TEST RECORD. THIS ONE BACKS A PUBLISHED PROMISE AND MUST NOT BE TICKED FROM THE HANDLER CODE. /legal/privacy/ states that a record is "deleted automatically by the database rather than by someone remembering to do it" after 24 months. The handler writes the ttl attribute; TTL must also be enabled on the table, and §7 does not record that it is. Until this is verified, that page promises a mechanism that may not run — which on a privacy policy is a false statement to the public. aws dynamodb describe-time-to-live --table-name <the table §7 records> and confirm TimeToLiveStatus: ENABLED, then write a record with a near-future ttl and confirm it disappears.
• npm run check:intake — the form's field table and the Lambda's agree on names, requiredness, caps and option sets. They are two independent tables on purpose (docs/05); this is what stops them drifting
• Both POST-redirect-GET landing pages reachable and noindex — /contact/received/ and /contact/could-not-send/. Both are excluded from the sitemap in astro.config.mjs
• Regenerate and re-commit the bio PDF — npm run build && npm run bio:pdf. Nothing in the build does this, so a change to /bio/, to §4, to the rate card or to the print styles leaves the committed PDF stale. It asserts one page and writes nothing if the count is wrong (R16). ⚠️ It is not byte-reproducible — Chrome stamps a /CreationDate, so two runs of identical content differ in digest and every re-render is a binary diff. Re-commit it when something actually changed, and say what in the message
• X-Robots-Tag: noindex on *.pdf, via a CloudFront response-headers policy. This is the PDF half of a decision already taken for the page. /bio/ is noindex and excluded from the sitemap because it is a condensed duplicate of /about/ and /fees/, and "two URLs competing on the same content is the one thing docs/04 is most concerned with." The committed PDF is a rendering of that same page, it is linked from /about/ which is index,follow, robots.txt allows everything, and Google indexes PDFs — so the duplicate the page-level noindex prevents arrives as a file instead. A Disallow will not do it: a blocked URL can still be listed. Found by adversarial-reviewer, 2026-08-31
• Booking link works, including the no-JavaScript fallback — conditional on R6; booking is parked and CONTACT.bookingUrl is null, so nothing renders and this passes vacuously until a tool is chosen. Nothing on /contact/ mentions booking, deliberately
• Favicon set complete
• Tested on iOS Safari, Android Chrome, desktop Safari/Chrome/Firefox
• Tested at 320 px and at 200% zoom

Infrastructure

• S3 versioning enabled
• Bucket not publicly readable; OAC in force
• ACM certificate valid; Namecheap validation CNAME still present
• CloudWatch alarms: Lambda errors, DLQ depth, 5xx rate
• Billing budget/alarm still active — aws budgets describe-budgets --account-id "$(aws sts get-caller-identity --query Account --output text)". docs/reference/AWS-Hosting-Guide.md set up an AWS Budget, which cloudwatch describe-alarms will never return. Whether one was actually created is not recorded anywhere: confirm, do not assume

Post-cutover, same day

• Sitemap submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
• Live site fetched as an anonymous crawler to confirm indexable content
• LinkedIn profile and ADRIC/ADRIO listings updated to point here
• Archive the old single-file build to _archive/ — do not delete it
• AGENTS.md Change Log entry recording the cutover