An online shop whose automated deploy erased its own configuration

Context

An online shop with Stripe payments and automatically generated recommendations, built by an external team and shipped through an automated deploy triggered on every code change.

Problem

The deploy overwrote the application directory wholesale. On every release, the payment keys and environment settings configured on the server disappeared, and the shop lost payment processing until somebody noticed.

What I did

1. 01Separated environment configuration from shipped code, so the deploy can no longer touch it
2. 02A procedure to reapply and verify configuration after each release
3. 03Secret management moved out of the code repository
4. 04Documented the mandatory post-deploy steps for the development team