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Environment

In DevOps, an environment typically is defined as a place into which we deploy changes. To be more precise, we may think of an environment as a logical grouping of Resources.

Environment Resource

In Clarive, an environment is itself a Resource. By creating a new Resource you are creating an environment.

How do I configure the contents of an environment?

This is mostly done in one of two ways:

  • For each Resource we create, we can set the environment to which it belongs. Some Resources do not support this, such as the Project Resource, whilst others such as the GenericServer do.
  • For every scope or project, we can define which Resources belong to a given environment for that particular scope.

Environment Naming

DEV, TEST, QA, PRE, PREP (preproduction), PRO and PROD (production) are all names of environments often used. By convention, we propose environment names be limited to two to four letters in length, all caps.

The Common (*) Environment

The Common Environment is a special environment in Clarive that holds Resources and variables that are common to every environment or that are not specific to any environment.

For example, the following Resources:

  • A GenericServer class Resource may be available to all environments or to only a few. Therefore the common environment here means all.
  • A GitRepository Resource may be assigned to the Common Environment, but actually means NONE, since a source code repository does not have the concept of environment itself (i.e. you do not create one Git repository for every environment).

Legacy: Baseline and bl

Older versions of Clarive had the concept of a bl, which translates as baseline, although in fact its meaning is environment.

Internally, environment is stored with the name bl, and it is thus visible in YAML files and other places.