While the product is still being built, the marketing site and the customer
portal should not be reachable — but they must stay reachable for us.
- A toggle in the console (site.manage, Owner/Admin) stored in a new
app_settings table, because this has to be flippable without a deploy.
- Outsiders get a placeholder with 503 + noindex, not 200: a 200 invites search
engines to index the placeholder as the site's content, which is far harder
to undo than to prevent.
- Anyone on the management VPN, and any signed-in operator, sees the real site.
The console, Livewire's endpoint, the Stripe webhook and the health check are
always reachable — otherwise the switch could only be flipped once.
- robots.txt is generated by the app and follows the switch. It had to stop
being a static file: nginx short-circuited it and Laravel's stock file said
'Disallow:' with an empty value, so crawlers were never told anything.
- Settings reads fall back to the default when the table is unavailable. The
gate reads one on every request, so a deploy running new code before migrate
would otherwise answer the entire site with a 500.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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