Creating a staging environment

🆘 Support
1

Hi there,

I’m new to DataCMS! I want to create a separate staging environment for our website built with Jekyll and DatoCMS (different deployment, different models etc). I already have a separate deployment on Netlify for the dev branch of our repo. I just created a new ‘staging’ environment on DatoCMS admin dashboard. How do I make the staging deployment on Netlify point to the staging environment (and not the live environment) on DatoCMS? When I go to the API keys section under the staging env, I still see the same API keys (as the ones in the live environment) so I’m a bit confused.

My usecase for creating a new staging env is to safely test new and modified models (changes to our schema).

2

does doing something like bundler exec dato dump --token=<api_token> --environment=staging work? I tried it out, but seems like it didn’t get the schema changes I made on the admin ui

3

for context, our deployment of the jekyll site on Netlify uses dato dump to pull content from Dato CMS

4

Hello @raivat and welcome to the community

Although they do have the same API key, you can specify what environment should be used in the requests by adding a header to your CDA GraphQL requests: Content Delivery API - API endpoint and header modes - DatoCMS Docs
Or, if you are using the CMA (The Rest API) you can use this right here: Using the Javascript client - DatoCMS

5

In that case, for the dato dump you can specify the environment as such Other SSGs - Integrating with other static generators - DatoCMS Docs

6

Hi @m.finamor,

Thanks for the detailed info and for welcoming me in this vibrant community! If the --environment flag works, any idea why did it not work when I did bundler exec dato dump --token=<api_token> --environment=staging ?

I added a new field in a model in the staging env via the web UI. If I understand correctly, after adding the field, when I run the dato dump command again, I should see it in the respective .yml file correct?

7

since I’m using jekyll, would this be affected by the dato.config.rb file?

8

@raivat The best way to check if you are fetching the new environment would be to create a new record on the new environment, and trying to fetch it using Other SSGs - Accessing records - DatoCMS Docs if you can fetch it, then you can be sure that the flag is working, if not, let us know so we can try and reproduce the issue

9

Thanks so much for this @m.finamor ! I was able to use this and see a newly created record (on my local jekyll preview). However, I’m confused to see that I can’t find this new field in my local .yaml file. Is that expected behaviour or something is wrong? Thanks!

10

@raivat great! Regarding the .yaml file, can you send it to us at support@datocms.com so we can take a look at it? I can follow up with you there directly :slight_smile:

11

Thanks! I just sent the email :slight_smile: