I currently have my app up and running, the app.yaml
and dispatch.yaml
are in the root of the application and I deploy through Google Cloud CLI.
This works well for the moment, though as I move to having a dev
, staging
and prod
environment I can see that it's no longer viable.
The main issue I see is that I have to edit the variables in the app.yaml
file so they are appropriate for environment (for example I use env_variables
to store mysql credentials...).
I can't find anything in the docs that points to the correct way to manage this, any ideas?
Also... When deploying from a GIT repo it seems that the app.yaml
needs to be in the repo, is this correct? It doesn't seem right to me... There must be a better way!
Note: assuming you use a different application to implement each environment, not different services/module of the same application, which IMHO would be an unnecessary complication. See How to deploy one app engine app to multiple projects
Personally I use a different git branch for each environment.
Granted I only have 2 environments: a development/staging one and the production one, but the same principle applies:
The branch structure reflects the flow through environments:
- the
master
branch is used for the dev
environment
- the
staging
branch is pulled off the master
branch
- the
production
branch is pulled off the staging
branch
To propagate code changes from one environment to another you'd merge the respective child branch to the newer parent branch version (which contains the changes you want to pick up) and deploy the merged child branch code to the corresponding environment.
Each branch has its own version of the app.yaml
file. You'll have to keep an eye on conflicts in this file which may pop up whenever changes to it are propagated from one branch to another.
See also Environment Specific Variables In Google App Engine Java (and maybe its linked/related posts).
You can use a configuration file or datastore settings to keep track of this environment information. At minute 26 in this talk I give some examples of how to customize your environment without needing different app.yaml
files.
gcloud app deploy
also accepts a list of yaml files on the command line, with the default being app.yaml
.