Using Environments on Craft Cloud

Craft Cloud projects allow you to manage three distinct environments or “versions” of your site, each with their own resources and settings. Environments are perfect for testing changes before rolling them out to a live site.

Features #

Most of your work in Cloud will be in the context of an environment. Each environment’s landing page has a summary of actions that are available to you.

Deployments #

View current and past deployments, or start a new one. Read more about deploying to Craft Cloud.

Logs #

Review + search logs from your live app.

Backups #

Create and download snapshots of your database. Backups are created nightly, and you can start a new one at-will—they’re retained for 30 days, either way.

Variables #

Configure this’s environment variables. Adding, updating, or removing a variable requires a deployment to take effect—but you can make multiple changes, then trigger a deployment to keep related or dependent changes in sync.

Cloud automatically sets a number of variables that are essential to your application. These are listed in the System Variables section, and they cannot be changed or overridden.

Commands #

Run a Craft console command from your browser. History and logs for past commands are available here, as well.

Every deploy also triggers a cloud/up command, so you’ll see those records among any commands you’ve manually run.

Access #

Get credentials to this environment’s database and asset storage. Don’t share these details with anyone!

Settings #

Rename the environment, or change the branch it’s associated with (and when it will be deployed).

Resources #

Every environment gets its own database. Data is not automatically cloned from one environment to another, so you will need to manually restore a backup—that backup could come from another Cloud environment, or a local development database.

All environments in a project share a single asset storage bucket, but they are separated into top-level directories named after their environment’s ID (or, more accurately, its UUID).

Cloud generates a preview domain for each environment—or allows you to connect a custom domain or subdomain thereof.

Environment Settings #

When you create an environment, you’ll give it a name, select a Git branch, and choose a deployment trigger. All three options can be changed any time from the environment’s Settings screen.

Production Environment #

In your project’s main Settings screen, you can select a Production Environment. This setting has two effects:

Warming #

The production environment’s function is kept “warm” by our infrastructure by periodically invoking it.

To conserve compute resources (and therefore energy consumption), Cloud allows non-production environments’ functions to “sleep” after about 15 minutes. This means that—following a period of no activity—there may be a 1–2 second delay prior to the first request being served.

These invocations do not fully bootstrap Craft, so they will be invisible to your application.

Front-End URLs #

Craft Console uses the production environment’s preview domain (or a custom domain connected to it, once verified) when generating public URLs to the project. You may see these at the project level—but when you’re managing a single environment, those URLs will always link to that environment.

Deleting an Environment #

Environments can be deleted at any time. Keep in mind that their resources will be destroyed, and they will immediately stop serving traffic. Everything below will be unrecoverable:

• Your database and everything in it will be deleted;
• Any assets uploaded to the environment will be deleted;
• We remove all system and custom variables belonging to the environment;
• The environment’s settings, deployment history, command history, logs, and temporary credentials are all deleted;

Domains pointed at a deleted environment will also stop resolving.

Instead of deleting an environment, we recommend creating a new one, then pointing custom domains at that—the “old” environment can stay around until you’re confident the new one is properly configured. You are not billed for inactive environments.