Build Robust & Production Quality Applications - Lesson 6: Staging Server & Production Servers

24 May 2015

Follow this tutorial on Heroku to understand the difference between staging and prodcution

A few things I'd like to add:

1) Make staging server's configuration and data as close to the production server as possible - after all, the purpose of having the staging server is to be able to test out new features in a "production like" environment.

If you production app is already launched, you can periodically take database dumps from the production server to populate the staging server. You could automate this as well with either a replication service, or if you are on Heroku, use Heroku's follower DB (comes with a cost) https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-follower-databases

2) You want to be mindful on email sending on staging - staging server will actually send out emails. You want to make sure that you do not spam your users while testing out features on the staging server. This can be achieved by adding a conditional in your mailer to see if the environment is staging, and if it is, set email recipients to administrators (such as yourself). This way, you can still test and verify that emails are sent out, but you don't spam users.

3) Your staging server can (and typically should) have a different config itself - you just need to create a staging.rb file in config/environments directory, and with it you can specify the exact settings you want on there (for example, turning on asset pipeline or not, sending out email or not, charging credit card for real or not, etc). On your Heroku staging server, make sure to set RACKENV and RAILSENV to staging, then it'll use that config instead.