We use Federalist for production and "preview" deployments.
Federalist is integrated with Github such that on each push to the master branch, the site is automatically and built and deployed to production, where it is immediately available at findtreatment.gov. In addition, this process also happens for all other branches in Github, which will be available at URLs specified by Federalist.
In order to build the site, Federalist will call the federalist npm script (npm run federalist) and deploy everything that is in the _site folder. More information can be found in the Federalist Docs.
To build the site manually, you'll need node and npm installed and have have completed the steps to setup local development..
Run npm run federalist from your command line or terminal.
The results of the build process will live in the ./build folder in the root of the project.
This is a "static" application that consists only of the files in the build folder after following the previous step. To deploy, place the contents of the build folder wherever your web server of choice expects and/or serves static files like .html, .js, and .css.
Since this is a "static" application all environment variables must be available at build time and must not contain anything considered sensitive. This application uses ".env" files and the dotenv library to provide environment variables to the build environment. As long as the application is built using npm run federalist or npm run build, the environment variables will be available.
Variables are loaded in a cascading fashion to allow default values and overriding of those value per environment, that is .env is loaded followed by either .env.development or .env.production depending on the build environment.