# Ship and operate How a change reaches users and what keeps production honest: branches, environments, the CI gates, releases, and the runbooks for deploys, rollbacks and the watchers. - Page: - Updated: 2026-09-27 - Verified against: `364c452` on 2026-09-27 - From the Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji — Knowledge Base wiki. Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji is quoted verbatim, cited by Ang, and never altered. --- A change travels one road. It starts on a branch from `integration`, passes every gate on a pull request, and is merged by the owner, which deploys **staging**. A release merges `integration` into `main`, which runs the **gated production deploy**: every required check on the exact commit, the API and the website proven before anyone can reach them, then promotion, then the tag. The app follows from that tag. Nobody deploys by hand, and every step can be undone. ![Poster 11 — the delivery pipeline: from a branch to staging, to a release on main, to production and the App Store, every step gated by CI, verified by commit, and reversible](https://docs.gurbanisoul.com/posters/11-delivery-pipeline.svg) ## How it works - [Branching and delivery flow](https://docs.gurbanisoul.com/process/branching/) — the branch model, which pull requests squash and which merge, and why. - [Environments](https://docs.gurbanisoul.com/process/environments/) — local, staging and production side by side: hosts, the API, data, protection, who deploys. - [CI gates](https://docs.gurbanisoul.com/process/ci-gates/) — what every workflow and job proves, and which a merge requires (poster 10). - [Release process](https://docs.gurbanisoul.com/process/release/) — the steps from a green `integration` to a tagged production release. ## Runbooks - [Deploys](https://docs.gurbanisoul.com/process/runbooks/deploy/) — the CI-gated pipeline gate by gate, its secrets, and how to read a failed run. - [Rollback](https://docs.gurbanisoul.com/process/runbooks/rollback/) — the website and the API together, the Render standby, a dataset, the app. - [Moving production to functions](https://docs.gurbanisoul.com/process/runbooks/services-production/) — the per-context cut-over, gated on the performance baseline and the data canary. - [The docs site](https://docs.gurbanisoul.com/process/runbooks/docs-site/) — keeping docs.gurbanisoul.com honest: deploys, watchers, pins, reviews. - [Support inbox](https://docs.gurbanisoul.com/process/runbooks/support-inbox/) — the public support address and how mail to it is handled. - [Launch-notice sign-up](https://docs.gurbanisoul.com/process/runbooks/newsletter/) — the sign-up on the landing page and its privacy rules. ## The handbook The rules behind all of this — the invariants, local setup, delivery and versioning, brand and domains, the release timeline — are the [engineering handbook](https://docs.gurbanisoul.com/engineering/).