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Environments

When developing systems, it is necessary to create separate resources perimeters to test new features or corrections, while maintaining clients resources operational. Like branches on Github, environments allows to create duplicatas of a workspace.

Overview​

Resources can be managed in several environments aligned on your team deployment processes. By default, the only environment available is the main environment. You can create additional environments to manage your resources in different stages of the deployment process. For example, you can create an staging environment to test your resources before deploying them to the main environment.

Our philosophy​

Traditional cloud platforms have no opinion on how to manage environments and offers basic tools on which techs can design and implement environment management. We realized at OwlGrid that most of SaaS projects use environments with a branch system to deliver features continuously.

Main and other environments​

When creating a workspace, a default environments is created, named main. We recommand to use the main environment as the production environment.

It is possible to create new environments by creating a new branch in the configuration / code repositorie(s) and declaring a new environment in the portal or through the APIs.

Repositories​

Workspace configuration and code is stored in Github repositories. A workspace environment is associated to a branch in these configurations / code repositories. This allow to tirer parti of Git branches tools (merge, pull request, etc.) and have rigourous branches routes.

To create a new environment and link it to a repository, please check this page.

OwlGrid is installed as a Github app in code and infrastructure repositories, which allow to detect automatically new commits, branches and to deploy automatically changes.

Variables​

Some values may differ between environments. For example, if the "main" environment contains workflows that interact with an external payment service (url: https://prod.payment.com/), we would like to interact with a development service to avoid updating production data (ex : https://mock.payment.com/).

The workspace variables allows to define variables which value differs between environments, without needing to change source code or configuration. Variables defined in an environment are available in all resources in that environment.

For more informations, please check this page

Resources​

Resources are only available in a specific environment.