DigitalOcean deployment: the game server never entered a manual-SCP era

Situation

For the first launch, it would have been easy to SSH into the droplet, pull the repository and start the Compose stack by hand. That can look acceptable for a prototype, but from that point onward production state drifts further from the history visible in Git. In a multiplayer product, the backend and frontend also need to evolve together.

Approach

I built a GitHub Actions deployment with explicit production configuration and server-side startup steps. Every release was built from a specific commit, and we did not develop directly on the server. Port allocation was designed to avoid collisions with other services on the droplet, while public traffic remained behind a reverse proxy.

Outcome

Production was reproducible from day one. A new release was not a sequence of manual SSH actions but another execution of the same pipeline. That made it natural to add smoke tests, TLS handling and rollback-style verification later.