HowTo: Do better deployments

You are about to roll out an important feature to your staging or production environment and want to be extra sure that everything will work out right? This document provides tips that can help you avoid surprises and help you prepare your project optimally for being deployed.

Prerequisites

Read access to your codebase

Simulate your application

To simulate your application behavior and how it looks when deployed to the staging or production environment, bootstrap the deploy.yml files used by those environments. The following sections show what needs to be done.

Prepare your local hosts file

In these deploy.yml files, you specify the actual endpoint names that determine the URLs under which your environment is reachable. To work locally, point your DNS names to your local development environment by adding host entries in your local /etc/hosts file.

Bootstrap with deploy.yml

For development purposes, your project has different deploy.yml files. You can, however, use the deploy.yml files used during deployment to staging and production environments to simulate the app’s behavior.

You must have the following deploy.yml files in your project (it may vary, depending on the total quantity of your environments):

• deploy.(PROJECT_NAME)-prod.yml
• deploy.(PROJECT_NAME)-staging.yml

PROJECT_NAME represents the name of your project.

Bootstrap your deploy.yml:

docker/sdk boot (THE YML file of your choice) && docker/sdk up

It starts up your application, which is reachable through its staging and production URLs and behaves just like it would in your PaaS environments. This setup shows whether your application builds correctly with the deploy files used in the PaaS pipelines and lets you check out the look and feel of your application more authentically.