Pre-Deploy Checklist

Before deploying to production:

1. Verify all tests pass in CI on the exact commit being deployed.
2. Verify the build completes without warnings or errors.
3. Check that environment variables are set correctly in the production environment.
4. If there are database migrations, verify they’ve been tested and have rollback scripts.
5. Confirm the rollback procedure: how to revert to the previous version if something goes wrong.
6. Check that monitoring and alerting are in place for the affected services.
7. Deploy to staging first and smoke-test the critical paths before promoting to production.
8. Notify the team that a deploy is happening.