Should You Deploy from Main or a Production Branch?

Friday, 4:57 p.m.: a hotfix is approved in chat, merged to main, and deployed by habit. On Monday, nobody can say which review counted, whether the emergency bypass was allowed, or which commit should be rolled back. That is why the argument is rarely about elegance. main promises one obvious truth; a separate production branch promises a final gate. Both fail when release rules live in memory instead of policy.

The real decision is operational: where approvals attach, what auditors can reconstruct, and how reversions work under pressure. If deploys come from main, promotion controls must sit in CI/CD, environments, and signed artifacts. If deploys come from production, branch updates need strict governance, or the branch becomes a shadow workflow full of undocumented cherry-picks and unclear provenance.