Hello,

Just a quick note for anyone involved/interested in web development stuff at the Tor Project.

From now on, all production deployments of web projects under the tpo/web GitLab namespace, in addition to the TPA status site, will need to be triggered manually by project maintainers via the GitLab CI web interface or the API.

Before triggering those deployments, we encourage contributors to review their changes on the new staging websites for which deployments are themselves automatic.

To access the staging version of a website, simply replace "torproject.org" with "staging.torproject.net" in the URL, so for instance the staging deployment of "www.torproject.org" is accessible at "www.staging.torproject.net", the one for "blog.torproject" is at "blog.staging.torproject.net", and so on.

For details, please see the GitLab issue: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/team/-/issues/34

In addition, from now on both staging websites and review apps (under review.torproject.net) are concealed with a simple HTTP authentication prompt, to avoid regular visitors and web indexes from accessing them. To dismiss the prompt, simply enter "tor-www" (without quotes) in the username field, leaving the password field blank. Or simply add tor-www to the URL as in: https://tor-www@blog.staging.torproject.net

For details about this change, see the GitLab issue: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/team/-/issues/35

Thanks,

-- Jerome aka lavamind