Branching and Deployment

Branch Strategy

Cycle Journal uses a GitLab Flow style environment branch model.

Flow	Target
feature/* -> PR -> develop	Integration and dev deploy
develop -> PR -> main	Production release
fix/* -> PR -> main -> merge back to develop	Production hotfix

develop is the default branch. main is production and must receive changes only through pull requests.

Environments

Environment	Branch	Cloud Run	Firestore
dev	develop	cycle-api-dev	dev-db
prod	main	cycle-api-prod	(default)

The GCP project remains cycle-journal. Project-level IAM, billing, quotas, and Artifact Registry are shared.

CI/CD

.github/workflows/api-ci-cd.yml runs API lint and tests on pull requests to develop or main.

On push:

• develop builds and deploys the API image to cycle-api-dev.
• main builds and deploys the API image to cycle-api-prod.

The workflow expects these GitHub secrets:

Secret	Purpose
GCP_WORKLOAD_IDENTITY_PROVIDER	Workload Identity Federation provider
GCP_SERVICE_ACCOUNT	Deploy service account email

Use GitHub Environments:

• api-dev: no approval gate
• api-prod: require reviewer approval before production deploy

Terraform

Use directory-per-environment Terraform:

terraform -chdir=infra/environments/shared plan
terraform -chdir=infra/environments/dev plan
terraform -chdir=infra/environments/prod plan

Do not switch environments with Terraform workspaces.