testpilot.firefox.com just got a lot easier to work on

We originally built Test Pilot on top of Django and some JS libraries to fulfill our product requirements as well as keep us flexible enough to evolve quickly since we were a brand new site.

As the site has grown, we’ve dropped a few requirements, and realized that we were using APIs from our engagement team to collect newsletter sign ups, APIs from our measurement team for our metrics, and everything else on the site was essentially HTML and JS. We used the Django scaffolding for updating the experiments, but there was no reason we needed to.

I’m happy to highlight that as of today testpilot.firefox.com is served 100% statically. Moving to flat files means:

Easier to deploy. All we do is copy files to an S3 bucket. No more SQL migrations or strange half-pushed states.

More secure. With just flat files we have way less surface area to attack.

Easier to participate in. You’ll no longer need to set up Docker or a database. Just check out the files, run npm install and you’re done. (disclaimer: we just pushed this today, so we actually still need to update the documentation)

Excellent change control. Instead of using an admin panel on the site, we now use GitHub to manage our static content. This means all changes are tracked for free, we already have a process in place for reviewing pull requests, and it’s easy to roll back or manipulate the data because it’s all in the repository already.

If you want to get involved with Test Pilot, come join us in #testpilot (or webchat)!