Staging environments
production / staging / testing
An app on fortrabbit represents a project or website. It can be connected to a Git repo at GitHub. An environment can be linked to a branch of a Git repo. Each app has at least one environment.
Move fast, break nothing. Experiment without confidence and without downtime. Multi staging is quite the opposite of open heart surgery — it's an advanced strategy to run the same application in separate but similar environments. It's especially useful in teams but can also bring benefits for the one-man-army.
# Stateful and isolated
The fortrabbit platform is serverful, as PHP is a server-side language. This means environments are stateful. An environment is more than just deployed code and artifacts — it also contains runtime data such as logs, sessions, uploads, and the state of a database. Each environment is a fully isolated hosting environment. Services run completely separated from each other, ensuring there is no performance interference.
Environments have their own components, which can be scaled individually. Use smaller setups for development and staging to save costs and resources.
# Use cases
Multi-staging is the opposite of "open heart surgery"—it's a best practice for running the same application in separate, but similar, environments. This approach is especially valuable for teams, but solo developers can benefit as well.
Typical use cases for multi-staging include:
- Development: Safely build and test new features
- Testing/QA: Verify new releases
- Staging: Final review, client demos
- Hotfixes: Test urgent fixes in isolation
Reduce the risk of unexpected issues in production.