Staging changes

It is recommended to stage your code changes for either App Engine or the bot, before deploying them in production. This help to access the impact of those changes, before they are deployed at scale.

• Staging changes
  • Prerequisites
  • App Engine changes
  • Bot changes

---

Prerequisites

• You need to have a production setup deployed.

App Engine changes

You can test your UI or cron changes on a staging server instance using:

python butler.py deploy --staging --config-dir=$CONFIG_DIR

Once deployed, the changes will be visible on https://staging-dot-<your project id>.appspot.com.

Note: The staging server uses the same database as the production server. So, be careful of any changes that may impact the data in the production database.

Bot changes

You can test code changes on a particular compute engine bot using:

python butler.py remote \
  --instance-name <your instance name> \
  --project <your project id> \
  --zone <your project zone> \
  stage --config-dir=$CONFIG_DIR

Note:

• These changes will not be overwritten by any production deployments for 2 days to allow adequate time for your changes to be tested. To discard those changes, just reboot the bot.
• This functionality is currently only supported on a Google Compute Engine bot running one of the docker images provided in the docker directory.