Launch Checklist

Single source of truth for platform launch readiness. Work through it top-to-bottom before announcing publicly.

Pre-Launch: Environment & Configuration

Environment Variables

Verify all required env vars are set in Vercel project settings:

Live status is visible at /ops → Analytics Status panel.

Robots & Indexing

• /robots.txt disallows /api/, /ops, /syndicate
• /sitemap.xml generates correctly at build time
• No noindex on public content pages — only /ops is noindex by design
• Canonical URLs set on all content pages via buildArticleMetadata

Metadata & OG Images

• Default OG image renders at /opengraph-image.tsx (1200×630, Node.js runtime)
• Dynamic OG image API live at /api/og?title=&section=&description=
• All article pages use buildArticleMetadata → full OG + Twitter card + canonical
• Twitter handle @asquaresolution is correct in lib/metadata.ts

Pre-Launch: Content Review

Minimum Content

Recommended minimum before public announcement:

• 3+ Docs entries (publishing-workflow and frontmatter-reference already exist)
• 1+ Systems entry
• 1+ Labs entry
• 1+ Case Studies entry
• 3+ Failure Archive entries (edge-runtime, blockjs-v6, server-module already exist)
• 3+ Execution Logs entries
• At least 1 complete Track with lessons

Content Quality

• No status: draft entries in public listings (drafts only show in /ops dev view)
• All published items have title, description, date, tags
• No placeholder or lorem ipsum content
• All failure entries have severity, failure_status, failure_type, resolution_time
• All log entries have log_type, outcome, duration

Pre-Launch: SEO & Structured Data

Schema Validation

1. Open Google Rich Results Test → paste NEXT_PUBLIC_SITE_URL
2. Confirm WebSite schema (with SearchAction) renders correctly
3. Confirm Organization schema renders correctly
4. Open any article page → confirm TechArticle or Article schema present
5. Validate OG tags with OpenGraph.xyz

Core Web Vitals Targets

Run Lighthouse on at least one article page before launch:

# Install if needed
npm install -g lighthouse

# Run against production URL
lighthouse https://your-domain.com/docs/publishing-workflow --output html

Target scores:

• LCP: < 2.5s
• CLS: < 0.1
• FCP: < 1.8s

Web Vitals are also reported live in the browser console (dev) via the <WebVitals /> component.

Launch Day

Final Build Verification

# TypeScript check — must be 0 errors
npx tsc --noEmit

# Production build — must complete with 0 errors
next build

Deployment Steps

1. Push to main → Vercel auto-deploys
2. Watch build log in Vercel dashboard for errors
3. Preview deployment URL before aliasing to production domain
4. Check /ops on the live deployment — confirm section counts, no open incidents
5. Verify /sitemap.xml returns all pages on live domain
6. Verify /robots.txt disallows are correct

Post-Deploy Smoke Test

Visit each of these on the live domain:

• / — homepage loads, stats visible, featured failures present
• /docs — lists entries correctly
• /failures — failure archive loads, severity dots visible
• /logs — execution logs list loads
• /tags — tag cloud renders
• Any article page — OG image visible when pasted in Slack/Twitter
• /api/og?title=Test&section=LAB&description=Testing — returns 1200×630 image
• /sitemap.xml — valid XML with all pages
• /robots.txt — disallow rules present

Post-Launch

Analytics Confirmation

• Plausible dashboard shows first page view (if configured)
• GA4 Realtime shows activity (if configured)
• No console errors in production

Search Console Submission

1. Submit sitemap.xml to Google Search Console
2. Submit sitemap.xml to Bing Webmaster Tools
3. Request indexing of homepage and first 3 articles manually

Ongoing Publishing

• Add new content by creating MDX files in the appropriate content/ subdirectory
• Follow Publishing Workflow
• Reference frontmatter fields at Frontmatter Reference
• Use Deployment Workflow for release procedures
• Syndicate finished articles using the /syndicate tool
• Log each significant session at /logs
• Document failures at /failures