Question
On staging and production dropplets ...
- Posted on May 1, 2025
- DevelopmentDigitalOcean
Asked by StrugglingDeveloper
I have a set of simple (yet absolu.necessary) questions:
-
If I want to work on 3 settings local for dev and then 2 on the server, staging and production, does that mean that I need two droplets, one for staging and another for production?
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If it works fine in staging, as far as I sort of intuit it, in Django, it is just a matter of changing one link to send it to staging. So, the way to go is then to send it from the local station to the production server? or can it go from the staging server to the production server? That is, how do I go about?
Development server–> staging and if ok devl --> Production or Develp server --> staging --> production?
- I plan to be sending stuff as I develop (never did it before sorry), first to GithubActions and from there, I think to pull it from digitalocean? will it only import the changes?, I suppose, it does not overwrite what already exists.
There will be a way to roll things back to a stable version if for whatever the reason it has crashed?
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Hey there!
Yes, it’s best to have two separate Droplets as you mentioned: one for staging and one for production. That way, you can test in staging without breaking production.
The usual flow is:
Local → GitHub → Staging → Production
Once everything looks good in staging, you can deploy to production.
If you’re using GitHub Actions, you can set up separate workflows or branches for staging and production. And yep, it only pulls the new changes, not the whole project.
For rollbacks, you can use git tags, also make sure to have backups enabled.
Good luck with your project!
- Bobby
Heya,
You don’t need two droplets — you can run both staging and production on the same droplet, using different domains or ports, but it’s often safer and cleaner to separate them on two droplets, especially if production has higher performance or security needs.
The usual flow is: development → staging → production. You deploy from your local or CI (like GitHub Actions) to staging, test it there, and if everything is fine, deploy the same code to production.
When you use GitHub Actions, you can set it up to deploy only the changes (using
git pullor similar), not overwriting everything blindly — but you need to configure this carefully.Yes, you can roll back: usually by tagging stable versions in Git, or using a backup/snapshot of the server or database to restore a known-good state if something breaks.
Would you like me to outline a simple deploy strategy for this?
Heya, @strugglingdeveloper
You can use a single droplet with Docker or separate virtual environments to isolate staging and production. This saves cost while still giving separation — each environment runs in its own container, on different ports or subdomains (e.g.
staging.domain.comanddomain.com).You can then use GitHub Actions to deploy to both containers selectively, based on branch (e.g.
mainfor production,devfor staging). Add rollback by using Docker image tags or snapshots instead of just Git.This way, you get isolation, lower cost, and version control — all without managing multiple droplets. Want a minimal Docker setup example for this?
Hope that this helps!