Hide "dev" website from public

[ntenpas]

Hi,

I make websites for small businesses, and I have a set development flow.

The "dev" branch of my repositories deploys websites to a domain: dev.example.com

The "prod" branch of my repositories deploys websites to the prod domain: example.com

I treat "dev" as a testing area for new features, and once tested in "dev", I push those features into "prod".

I am wondering, how can I hide my "dev" websites from the general public?

Currently, I disallow all pages in my robots.txt for the "dev" sites.

Is there a way that I can have the "dev" site only available on my LAN? I just have a home router setup.

Does anyone have any idea of how my flow or process can be better?

[nestors]

What I would do is use Identity Aware Proxy (https://cloud.google.com/iap/docs/concepts-overview).

With IAP you can protect your dev site by only allowing yourself (using your google login) to access the site. If you have several users that need to access the dev site you can create a Google group with all the users, and give IAP access to the group instead of the individual users.

[ntenpas]

Thanks nestors, that's a good solution. Let me try it out and see if I can get it working.

Thanks again,

-Nolan