Staging environments

Modern application development differs from quick-and-dirty cowboy coding in that changes don’t go right from the developer’s workstation to the production website. Instead, the application lifecycle passes multiple stages, like in this example:

• During development, a new feature is continually tested locally on the developer’s workstation.
• When the feature is finished, it is uploaded to a staging application that runs on the same platform as the production application. This ensures that all the issues that would otherwise occur in production can get fixed behind the scenes.
• Before the feature may be released in production, it has to undergo User Acceptance Testing (UAT) first. This step is common especially in client work by web agencies.
• After final approval, the new feature is deployed to the production environment.

A staging workflow like this ensures that proper QA is applied to every change, and in the end it prevents embarassing website issues and downtimes.

Practicing this multi-stage release management on freistilbox is not only simple but also encouraged by the ability to spin up additional deployment environments in your setup at no additional cost. Our Git-based deployment keeps your development overhead at a minimum and your development cycles fast. You can even release your Drupal or WordPress application using scripted workflows or Continuous Integration (CI) solutions such as Jenkins.