Setting up staging environment with Google App Engine

Question

I've been able to set up a production environment with the App Engine but now I want to consider setting up a staging environment but this seems harder than I've expected.

To set up the prod env I needed to create an app.yaml file:

env: flex
runtime: gs://elixir-runtime/elixir.yaml
runtime_config:
    release_app: statcasters
beta_settings:
    cloud_sql_instances: statcasters:us-central1:statcastersproduction

This makes sense and is super easy but what about a staging env? How do I tell the app engine to deploy a different app? I'm not finding really any good documentation of this anywhere.

Answer 1

I use the default app.yaml file to deploy to prod, and a separate app.staging.yaml file for staging.

To deploy to prod, I just run the normal deploy pointing to my prod project:

gcloud app deploy --project [prod-project-name]

To deploy to staging, I point to a separate staging project:

gcloud app deploy app.staging.yaml --project [staging-project-name]

Inside app.yaml, I use a environment variable to set the environment, eg:

env_variables:
  APP_ENV: "production"