production and staging sites

Hi there,

No, DigitalOcean does not automatically create a staging environment. You set that up manually.

On App Platform, the recommended approach is to create two separate apps pointed at different branches in your repo, for example a staging branch and a main branch. Each gets its own URL and independent environment variables.

This article covers the full multi-environment setup in detail: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/conceptual-articles/best-practices-app-platform-multi-environment

No — DigitalOcean doesn’t automatically create a staging site when you create an app. Each App Platform app is its own thing, deployed from the branch (and repo) you point it at. There’s no auto-generated staging counterpart.

The usual way people set up staging on App Platform is to run two separate apps:

• Production → deploys from your main branch
• Staging → a second app that deploys from a staging (or develop) branch

Each gets its own URL, its own environment variables, and its own database if you want full isolation. You push to staging, verify it there, then merge to main to ship to production. Since they’re separate apps, a bad deploy on staging never touches prod.

A couple of tips:

• Use per-app environment variables to point each at the right database/API keys, so the same code behaves correctly in each.
• If you don’t want a full second app, you can just use a preview/test branch and redeploy the same app, but a dedicated staging app is cleaner and safer.

So it’s a quick bit of manual setup, but nothing automatic. Hope that helps!

Heya,

To add to what’s already been said, since there isn’t a built-in staging environment, it’s worth knowing about two DigitalOcean features that make the two-app pattern less manual.

If what you actually want is a throwaway environment per change rather than a persistent staging site, App Platform’s GitHub Actions integration has a PR preview mode. Setting deploy_pr_preview: "true" on the deploy step spins up a temporary app automatically whenever a pull request opens, posts a link to it as a PR comment, and tears it down again once the PR closes:

- uses: digitalocean/app_action/deploy@v2
  with:
    deploy_pr_preview: "true"

That is closer to a review environment than a long-lived staging site, but it removes the need to hand-manage a second app if your workflow is per-branch reviews.

For the persistent staging app both prior answers describe, DigitalOcean’s Projects support environment tagging (Development, Staging, Production) in the control panel or via doctl, so you can group your staging and production apps for a filterable view instead of just tracking them by name. Paired with that is App Cloning, which lets you duplicate an existing app, including its component and instance size settings, rather than rebuilding the app spec from scratch for the new environment. One thing to watch: non-encrypted environment variables carry over on clone, but encrypted ones do not, so secrets need to be re-added by hand in the cloned app.

Regards