Staging is a test site, usually run through Heroku or Kubernetes that hosts our client’s site. Only our team can access staging; it is not open to the public. This means we can test and play and mess up and get things straightened out before pushing to production, which is typically the live site.
We seed realistic data whenever possible to replicate what’s on production, however, staging and production are hardly ever exactly the same. When the QA process has been completed, we can merge the branch from “develop” to “master”, to view the code on production.
This is typically done manually in a more controlled way to allow for immediate testing and fixing of any bugs or discrepancies that could affect our client’s business.