Best Practices for environments and deployment?

mike-k

Is there a posting or video that goes over the best way to manage versioning and deployment? If not, this would be valuable to the community. I'm particularly interested in the following:
* How to manage different environment variables between test and production
* How to set up a different set of endpoints for test and production. e.g. dev.api.myapp.com for dev and api.myapp.com for production
* How to most effectively develop, test and deploy code changes using Xano's tools
* Best practices for save points or version control

Any resources on this stuff will be appreciated.

Michael Udinski

Hey  - definitely.

Check out our documentation on Branches and how to use them, accompanied by a tutorial (also in the documentation). Branches are Xano's solution to develop, test, and deploy changes to your business logic. 
*Environment Variables are across entire workspaces, so they are not dependent on Branch/version.
*There are two different methods of directing an API endpoint to a specific branch (this is in the documentation). You can access a different branch by adding :branch name after the canonical or define the branch with a set header. 
*Since a Branch is a copy of the one you are basing it off of, it's best to make a copy - develop & test, then once you're satisfied with your changes, set that branch to live, and create your next branch from that one... essentially building on top from one to the other as you go. 

mike-k

thanks for this. i'll take a look.

mike-k

 - I have an external API that has a different api key and request URL between test and live environments. What's the best way to manage those keys between test and live? What I've done is to create a table called app_setttings, that holds this information, which we can query based on the data source. Any other ideas or best practices on how to manage things like this?

Puneet Mathur

I also have the same use case and would like to hear the best possible way to implement. Ideally, if the environment variables are branch specific, then it will make the logics easy to implement. 

Is this feature in the roadmap or is it available in any other plans?