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An Upsun environment contains one instance of an app (or group of apps) with all the services needed for it to run. Each project can include multiple environments, often divided into environment types. If you have a live site, you have at least a production environment. You may also have additional environments of the Staging or Development environment type, but there will only ever be one production environment. You can think of other environments as copies of your live site where you can run tests without worrying about damaging anything in production. Once you have completed your tests, you can merge your changes so that they’re instantly and seamlessly deployed to production. You can create environments for development, testing, staging, review, and so on. To organize your environments, you can create hierarchical relationships.

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Create environments

You can create new environments in one of two ways: When you branch an environment, you might want to create exact replicas of it. In this case, each new environment inherits all of the data and services from its parent environment. This includes databases, network storage, queues, and routing configurations. You can create Upsun environments on demand. Each environment is tied to a Git branch. If you use a source integration, you can even have environments created automatically for your pull requests and branches. You can also have branches that aren’t tied to a running instance of your application. These are called inactive environments.

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Default environment

Your default environment comes from your default branch and is a production environment. Your project must have a default environment, but you can name it as you want. This environment is your live site. You might want to give it a custom domain name.

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Environment status

Your environments can have one of three statuses:
  • Active: A deployed environment with services and data.
  • Inactive: An environment that isn’t deployed and has no services or data, only code.
  • Paused: An environment that hasn’t been redeployed in 14 days or longer.
You can see the status of your environments in the Console or the CLI.
When you open your project, inactive environments appear lighter in the environment list. You also can’t select them from the Environment dropdown menu.To check the status of an environment, you can also open it and view its information panel.
You can change an environment’s status at any time.

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Organize your environments

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Hierarchy