Three weeks from now I will open a terminal, ready to ship another program to mainnet-beta, and I will pause. What was the order again?
Did the IDL go up before or after the authority transfer? Was there a flag that saved me from a stalled deploy last time?
This checklist exists because I just walked the entire path devnet to mainnet, deploy to IDL to frontend to error handling, and I wrote it down while the details are still fresh. It is the document I wish I had on day one of that process. Run it top to bottom before every mainnet launch.
Why a checklist at all?
A Solana mainnet deploy is full of irreversible steps. The wallet that signs the deploy quietly becomes the program's upgrade authority. A buffer account left mid-deploy can strand real SOL. A plain anchor build after a verifiable build can produce a different hash and break verification later.
