I’m currently using DigitalOcean App Platform to deploy a web app and would like to set up both staging and production environments.
I’m wondering what the recommended approach is for managing multiple environments. Should I use separate apps? Separate branches with auto-deploy rules? How do you handle secrets, environment variables, and database connections for each environment?
Would love to hear how others are structuring this
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Accepted Answer
Hey!
A common approach is to create two separate App Platform apps, one for staging and one for production. This gives you clean isolation and lets you manage environment variables and databases independently.
You can connect each app to a different branch (e.g., main for prod, develop or staging for staging) and enable auto-deploy per branch.
For secrets and configs, define separate environment variables for each app in the dashboard.
If you’re using Managed Databases, you can spin up two instances or one with separate databases for each environment.
Hope that this helps!
- Bobby
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