stage	Release
group	Release
info	To determine the technical writer assigned to the Stage/Group associated with this page, see https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/ux/technical-writing/#assignments
type	reference
disqus_identifier	https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/environments.html

Environments and deployments

Introduced in GitLab 8.9.

Environments describe where code is deployed.

Each time GitLab CI/CD deploys a version of code to an environment, a deployment is created.

GitLab:

Provides a full history of deployments to each environment.
Tracks your deployments, so you always know what is currently deployed on your servers.

If you have a deployment service like Kubernetes associated with your project, you can use it to assist with your deployments. You can even access a web terminal for your environment from within GitLab.

View environments and deployments

Prerequisites:

You must have a minimum of Reporter permission.

To view a list of environments and deployments:

Go to the project's Operations > Environments page. The environments are displayed.
To view a list of deployments for an environment, select the environment name, for example, staging.

Deployments show up in this list only after a deployment job has created them.

Types of environments

There are two types of environments:

Static environments have static names, like staging or production.
Dynamic environments have dynamic names. Dynamic environments are a fundamental part of Review apps.

Create a static environment

You can create an environment and deployment in the UI or in your .gitlab-ci.yml file.

In the UI:

Go to the project's Operations > Environments page.
Select New environment.
Enter a name and external URL.
Select Save.

In your .gitlab-ci.yml file:

Specify a name for the environment and optionally, a URL, which determines the deployment URL. For example:

deploy_staging:
  stage: deploy
  script:
    - echo "Deploy to staging server"
  environment:
    name: staging
    url: https://staging.example.com

Trigger a deployment. (For example, by creating and pushing a commit.)

When the job runs, the environment and deployment are created.

NOTE: Some characters cannot be used in environment names. For more information about the environment keywords, see the .gitlab-ci.yml keyword reference.

Create a dynamic environment

To create a dynamic name and URL for an environment, you can use predefined CI/CD variables. For example:

deploy_review:
  stage: deploy
  script:
    - echo "Deploy a review app"
  environment:
    name: review/$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME
    url: https://$CI_ENVIRONMENT_SLUG.example.com
  only:
    - branches
  except:
    - master

In this example:

The name is review/$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME. Because the environment name can contain slashes (/), you can use this pattern to distinguish between dynamic and static environments.
For the url, you could use $CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME, but because this value may contain a / or other characters that would not be valid in a domain name or URL, use $CI_ENVIRONMENT_SLUG instead. The $CI_ENVIRONMENT_SLUG variable is guaranteed to be unique.

You do not have to use the same prefix or only slashes (/) in the dynamic environment name. However, when you use this format, you can use the grouping similar environments feature.

NOTE: Some variables cannot be used as environment names or URLs. For more information about the environment keywords, see the .gitlab-ci.yml keyword reference.

Configure manual deployments

You can create a job that requires someone to manually start the deployment. For example:

deploy_prod:
  stage: deploy
  script:
    - echo "Deploy to production server"
  environment:
    name: production
    url: https://example.com
  when: manual
  only:
    - master

The when: manual action:

Exposes a play button for the job in the GitLab UI.
Means the deploy_prod job is only triggered when the play button is clicked.

You can find the play button in the pipelines, environments, deployments, and jobs views.

Configure Kubernetes deployments

Introduced in GitLab 12.6.

If you are deploying to a Kubernetes cluster associated with your project, you can configure these deployments from your gitlab-ci.yml file.

NOTE: Kubernetes configuration isn't supported for Kubernetes clusters that are managed by GitLab. To follow progress on support for GitLab-managed clusters, see the relevant issue.

The following configuration options are supported:

namespace

In the following example, the job deploys your application to the production Kubernetes namespace.

deploy:
  stage: deploy
  script:
    - echo "Deploy to production server"
  environment:
    name: production
    url: https://example.com
    kubernetes:
      namespace: production
  only:
    - master

When deploying to a Kubernetes cluster using the GitLab Kubernetes integration, information about the cluster and namespace is displayed above the job trace on the deployment job page:

Configure incremental rollouts

Learn how to release production changes to only a portion of your Kubernetes pods with incremental rollouts.

CI/CD variables for environments and deployments

When you create an environment, you specify the name and URL.

If you want to use the name or URL in another job, you can use:

$CI_ENVIRONMENT_NAME. The name defined in the .gitlab-ci.yml file.
$CI_ENVIRONMENT_SLUG. A "cleaned-up" version of the name, suitable for use in URLs, DNS, etc. This variable is guaranteed to be unique.
$CI_ENVIRONMENT_URL. The environment's URL, which was specified in the .gitlab-ci.yml file or automatically assigned.

If you change the name of an existing environment, the:

$CI_ENVIRONMENT_NAME variable is updated with the new environment name.
$CI_ENVIRONMENT_SLUG variable remains unchanged to prevent unintended side effects.

Set dynamic environment URLs after a job finishes

Introduced in GitLab 12.9.

In a job script, you can specify a static environment URL. However, there may be times when you want a dynamic URL. For example, if you deploy a Review App to an external hosting service that generates a random URL per deployment, like https://94dd65b.amazonaws.com/qa-lambda-1234567, you don't know the URL before the deployment script finishes. If you want to use the environment URL in GitLab, you would have to update it manually.

To address this problem, you can configure a deployment job to report back a set of variables, including the URL that was dynamically-generated by the external service. GitLab supports the dotenv (.env) file format, and expands the environment:url value with variables defined in the .env file.

To use this feature, specify the artifacts:reports:dotenv keyword in .gitlab-ci.yml.

For an overview, see Set dynamic URLs after a job finished.

Example of setting dynamic environment URLs

The following example shows a Review App that creates a new environment per merge request. The review job is triggered by every push, and creates or updates an environment named review/your-branch-name. The environment URL is set to $DYNAMIC_ENVIRONMENT_URL:

review:
  script:
    - DYNAMIC_ENVIRONMENT_URL=$(deploy-script)                                 # In script, get the environment URL.
    - echo "DYNAMIC_ENVIRONMENT_URL=$DYNAMIC_ENVIRONMENT_URL" >> deploy.env    # Add the value to a dotenv file.
  artifacts:
    reports:
      dotenv: deploy.env                                                       # Report back dotenv file to rails.
  environment:
    name: review/$CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG
    url: $DYNAMIC_ENVIRONMENT_URL                                              # and set the variable produced in script to `environment:url`
    on_stop: stop_review

stop_review:
  script:
    - ./teardown-environment
  when: manual
  environment:
    name: review/$CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG
    action: stop

As soon as the review job finishes, GitLab updates the review/your-branch-name environment's URL. It parses the deploy.env report artifact, registers a list of variables as runtime-created, uses it for expanding environment:url: $DYNAMIC_ENVIRONMENT_URL and sets it to the environment URL. You can also specify a static part of the URL at environment:url:, such as https://$DYNAMIC_ENVIRONMENT_URL. If the value of DYNAMIC_ENVIRONMENT_URL is example.com, the final result is https://example.com.

The assigned URL for the review/your-branch-name environment is visible in the UI.

Note the following:

stop_review doesn't generate a dotenv report artifact, so it doesn't recognize the DYNAMIC_ENVIRONMENT_URL environment variable. Therefore you shouldn't set environment:url: in the stop_review job.
If the environment URL isn't valid (for example, the URL is malformed), the system doesn't update the environment URL.
If the script that runs in stop_review exists only in your repository and therefore can't use GIT_STRATEGY: none, configure pipelines for merge requests for these jobs. This ensures that runners can fetch the repository even after a feature branch is deleted. For more information, see Ref Specs for Runners.

Deployment safety

Deployment jobs can be more sensitive than other jobs in a pipeline, and might need to be treated with an extra care. There are multiple features in GitLab that help maintain deployment security and stability.

Protected environments

Environments can be "protected", restricting access to them.

For more information, see Protected environments.

Working with environments

Once environments are configured, GitLab provides many features for working with them, as documented below.

Environment rollback

When you roll back a deployment on a specific commit, a new deployment is created. This deployment has its own unique job ID. It points to the commit you're rolling back to.

For the rollback to succeed, the deployment process must be defined in the job's script.

Retry or roll back a deployment

If there is a problem with a deployment, you can retry it or roll it back.

To retry or rollback a deployment:

Go to the project's Operations > Environments.
Select the environment.
To the right of the deployment name:
- To retry a deployment, select Re-deploy to environment.
- To roll back to a deployment, next to a previously successful deployment, select Rollback environment.

Environment URL

The environment URL is exposed in a few places within GitLab:

In a merge request as a link:
In the Environments view as a button:
In the Deployments view as a button:

You can see this information in a merge request if:

The merge request is eventually merged to the default branch (usually master).
That branch also deploys to an environment (for example, staging or production).

For example:

Going from source files to public pages

With GitLab Route Maps, you can go directly from source files to public pages in the environment set for Review Apps.

Stopping an environment

When you stop an environment:

It moves from the list of Available environments to the list of Stopped environments on the Environments page.
An on_stop action, if defined, is executed.

Dynamic environments stop automatically when their associated branch is deleted.

Stop an environment when a branch is deleted

Environments can be stopped automatically using special configuration.

Consider the following example where the deploy_review job calls stop_review to clean up and stop the environment:

deploy_review:
  stage: deploy
  script:
    - echo "Deploy a review app"
  environment:
    name: review/$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME
    url: https://$CI_ENVIRONMENT_SLUG.example.com
    on_stop: stop_review
  rules:
    - if: $CI_MERGE_REQUEST_ID

stop_review:
  stage: deploy
  script:
    - echo "Remove review app"
  environment:
    name: review/$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME
    action: stop
  rules:
    - if: $CI_MERGE_REQUEST_ID
      when: manual

If you can't use Pipelines for merge requests, setting the GIT_STRATEGY to none is necessary in the stop_review job so that the runner doesn't try to check out the code after the branch is deleted.

When you have an environment that has a stop action defined (typically when the environment describes a Review App), GitLab automatically triggers a stop action when the associated branch is deleted. The stop_review job must be in the same stage as the deploy_review job in order for the environment to automatically stop.

Additionally, both jobs should have matching rules or only/except configuration. In the example above, if the configuration isn't identical, the stop_review job might not be included in all pipelines that include the deploy_review job, and it isn't possible to trigger action: stop to stop the environment automatically.

You can read more in the .gitlab-ci.yml reference.

Stop an environment after a certain time period

Introduced in GitLab 12.8.

You can set an expiry time for environments and stop them automatically after a certain period.

For example, consider the use of this feature with Review App environments. When you set up Review Apps, sometimes they keep running for a long time because some merge requests are left open and forgotten. Such idle environments waste resources and should be terminated as soon as possible.

To address this problem, you can specify an optional expiration date for Review App environments. When the expiry time is reached, GitLab automatically triggers a job to stop the environment, eliminating the need of manually doing so. In case an environment is updated, the expiration is renewed ensuring that only active merge requests keep running Review Apps.

To enable this feature, you must specify the environment:auto_stop_in keyword in .gitlab-ci.yml. You can specify a human-friendly date as the value, such as 1 hour and 30 minutes or 1 day. auto_stop_in uses the same format of artifacts:expire_in docs.

Note that due to resource limitation, a background worker for stopping environments only runs once every hour. This means that environments aren't stopped at the exact timestamp specified, but are instead stopped when the hourly cron worker detects expired environments.

Auto-stop example

In the following example, there is a basic review app setup that creates a new environment per merge request. The review_app job is triggered by every push and creates or updates an environment named review/your-branch-name. The environment keeps running until stop_review_app is executed:

review_app:
  script: deploy-review-app
  environment:
    name: review/$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME
    on_stop: stop_review_app
    auto_stop_in: 1 week
  rules:
    - if: $CI_MERGE_REQUEST_ID

stop_review_app:
  script: stop-review-app
  environment:
    name: review/$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME
    action: stop
  rules:
    - if: $CI_MERGE_REQUEST_ID
      when: manual

As long as a merge request is active and keeps getting new commits, the review app doesn't stop, so developers don't need to worry about re-initiating review app.

On the other hand, since stop_review_app is set to auto_stop_in: 1 week, if a merge request becomes inactive for more than a week, GitLab automatically triggers the stop_review_app job to stop the environment.

You can also check the expiration date of environments through the GitLab UI. To do so, go to Operations > Environments > Environment. You can see the auto-stop period at the left-top section and a pin-mark button at the right-top section. This pin-mark button can be used to prevent auto-stopping the environment. By clicking this button, the auto_stop_in setting is overwritten and the environment is active until it's stopped manually.

Delete a stopped environment

Introduced in GitLab 12.10.

You can delete stopped environments in one of two ways: through the GitLab UI or through the API.

Delete environments through the UI

To view the list of Stopped environments, navigate to Operations > Environments and click the Stopped tab.

From there, you can click the Delete button directly, or you can click the environment name to see its details and Delete it from there.

You can also delete environments by viewing the details for a stopped environment:

Go to the project's Operations > Environments page.
Click on the name of an environment within the Stopped environments list.
Click on the Delete button that appears at the top for all stopped environments.
Finally, confirm your chosen environment in the modal that appears to delete it.

Delete environments through the API

Environments can also be deleted by using the Environments API.

Prepare an environment

Introduced in GitLab 13.2.

By default, GitLab creates a deployment every time a build with the specified environment runs. Newer deployments can also cancel older ones.

You may want to specify an environment keyword to protect builds from unauthorized access, or to get access to environment-scoped variables. In these cases, you can use the action: prepare keyword to ensure deployments aren't created, and no builds are canceled:

build:
  stage: build
  script:
    - echo "Building the app"
  environment:
    name: staging
    action: prepare
    url: https://staging.example.com

Grouping similar environments

Introduced in GitLab 8.14.

As documented in Create a dynamic environment, you can prepend environment name with a word, followed by a /, and finally the branch name, which is automatically defined by the CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME predefined CI/CD variable.

In short, environments that are named like type/foo are all presented under the same group, named type.

If you name the environments review/$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME where $CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME is the branch name:

deploy_review:
  stage: deploy
  script:
    - echo "Deploy a review app"
  environment:
    name: review/$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME

If you visit the Environments page and the branches exist, you should see something like:

Environment incident management

You have successfully setup a Continuous Delivery/Deployment workflow in your project. Production environments can go down unexpectedly, including for reasons outside of your own control. For example, issues with external dependencies, infrastructure, or human error can cause major issues with an environment. This could include:

A dependent cloud service goes down.
A 3rd party library is updated and it's not compatible with your application.
Someone performs a DDoS attack to a vulnerable endpoint in your server.
An operator misconfigures infrastructure.
A bug is introduced into the production application code.

You can use incident management to get alerts when there are critical issues that need immediate attention.

View the latest alerts for environments (ULTIMATE)

Introduced in GitLab Ultimate 13.4.

If you set up alerts for Prometheus metrics, alerts for environments are shown on the environments page. The alert with the highest severity is shown, so you can identify which environments need immediate attention.

When the issue that triggered the alert is resolved, it is removed and is no longer visible on the environment page.

If the alert requires a rollback, you can select the deployment tab from the environment page and select which deployment to roll back to.

Auto Rollback (ULTIMATE)

Introduced in GitLab Ultimate 13.7.

In a typical Continuous Deployment workflow, the CI pipeline tests every commit before deploying to production. However, problematic code can still make it to production. For example, inefficient code that is logically correct can pass tests even though it causes severe performance degradation. Operators and SREs monitor the system to catch such problems as soon as possible. If they find a problematic deployment, they can roll back to a previous stable version.

GitLab Auto Rollback eases this workflow by automatically triggering a rollback when a critical alert is detected. GitLab selects and redeploys the most recent successful deployment.

Limitations of GitLab Auto Rollback:

The rollback is skipped if a deployment is running when the alert is detected.
A rollback can happen only once in three minutes. If multiple alerts are detected at once, only one rollback is performed.

GitLab Auto Rollback is turned off by default. To turn it on:

Visit Project > Settings > CI/CD > Automatic deployment rollbacks.
Select the checkbox for Enable automatic rollbacks.
Click Save changes.

Monitoring environments

If you have enabled Prometheus for monitoring system and response metrics, you can monitor the behavior of your app running in each environment. For the monitoring dashboard to appear, you need to Configure Prometheus to collect at least one supported metric.

In GitLab 9.2 and later, all deployments to an environment are shown directly on the monitoring dashboard.

Once configured, GitLab attempts to retrieve supported performance metrics for any environment that has had a successful deployment. If monitoring data was successfully retrieved, a Monitoring button appears for each environment.

Clicking the Monitoring button displays a new page showing up to the last 8 hours of performance data. It may take a minute or two for data to appear after initial deployment.

All deployments to an environment are shown directly on the monitoring dashboard, which allows easy correlation between any changes in performance and new versions of the app, all without leaving GitLab.

Embedding metrics in GitLab Flavored Markdown

Metric charts can be embedded within GitLab Flavored Markdown. See Embedding Metrics within GitLab Flavored Markdown for more details.

Web terminals

Web terminals were added in GitLab 8.15 and are only available to project Maintainers and Owners.

If you deploy to your environments with the help of a deployment service (for example, the Kubernetes integration), GitLab can open a terminal session to your environment.

This is a powerful feature that allows you to debug issues without leaving the comfort of your web browser. To enable it, follow the instructions given in the service integration documentation.

Note that container-based deployments often lack basic tools (like an editor), and may be stopped or restarted at any time. If this happens, you lose all your changes. Treat this as a debugging tool, not a comprehensive online IDE.

Once enabled, your environments gain a Terminal button:

You can also access the terminal button from the page for a specific environment:

Wherever you find it, clicking the button takes you to a separate page to establish the terminal session:

This works like any other terminal. You're in the container created by your deployment so you can:

Run shell commands and get responses in real time.
Check the logs.
Try out configuration or code tweaks etc.

You can open multiple terminals to the same environment, they each get their own shell session and even a multiplexer like screen or tmux.

Check out deployments locally

In GitLab 8.13 and later, a reference in the Git repository is saved for each deployment, so knowing the state of your current environments is only a git fetch away.

In your Git configuration, append the [remote "<your-remote>"] block with an extra fetch line:

fetch = +refs/environments/*:refs/remotes/origin/environments/*

Scoping environments with specs

Introduced in GitLab Premium 9.4.

Environment scoping for CI/CD variables was moved to all tiers in GitLab 12.2.

You can limit the environment scope of a CI/CD variable by defining which environments it can be available for.

Wildcards can be used and the default environment scope is *. This means that any jobs can have this variable regardless of whether an environment is defined.

For example, if the environment scope is production, then only the jobs having the environment production defined would have this specific variable. Wildcards (*) can be used along with the environment name, therefore if the environment scope is review/* then any jobs with environment names starting with review/ would have that particular variable.

Some GitLab features can behave differently for each environment. For example, you can create a secret variable to be injected only into a production environment.

In most cases, these features use the environment specs mechanism, which offers an efficient way to implement scoping within each environment group.

Let's say there are four environments:

production
staging
review/feature-1
review/feature-2

Each environment can be matched with the following environment spec:

Environment Spec	`production`	`staging`	`review/feature-1`	`review/feature-2`
*	Matched	Matched	Matched	Matched
production	Matched
staging		Matched
review/*			Matched	Matched
review/feature-1			Matched

As you can see, you can use specific matching for selecting a particular environment, and also use wildcard matching (*) for selecting a particular environment group, such as Review Apps (review/*).

Note that the most specific spec takes precedence over the other wildcard matching. In this case, the review/feature-1 spec takes precedence over review/* and * specs.

Environments Dashboard (PREMIUM)

See Environments Dashboard for a summary of each environment's operational health.

Limitations

In the environment: name, you are limited to only the predefined CI/CD variables. Re-using variables defined inside script as part of the environment name doesn't work.

Navigation Menu

Repository navigation

Environments and deployments

View environments and deployments

Types of environments

Create a static environment

Create a dynamic environment

Configure manual deployments

Configure Kubernetes deployments

Configure incremental rollouts

CI/CD variables for environments and deployments

Set dynamic environment URLs after a job finishes

Example of setting dynamic environment URLs

Deployment safety

Protected environments

Working with environments

Environment rollback

Retry or roll back a deployment

Environment URL

Going from source files to public pages

Stopping an environment

Stop an environment when a branch is deleted

Stop an environment after a certain time period

Auto-stop example

Delete a stopped environment

Delete environments through the UI

Delete environments through the API

Prepare an environment

Grouping similar environments

Environment incident management

View the latest alerts for environments (ULTIMATE)

Auto Rollback (ULTIMATE)

Monitoring environments

Embedding metrics in GitLab Flavored Markdown

Web terminals

Check out deployments locally

Scoping environments with specs

Environments Dashboard (PREMIUM)

Limitations

Further reading

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Environments and deployments

View environments and deployments

Types of environments

Create a static environment

Create a dynamic environment

Configure manual deployments

Configure Kubernetes deployments

Configure incremental rollouts

CI/CD variables for environments and deployments

Set dynamic environment URLs after a job finishes

Example of setting dynamic environment URLs

Deployment safety

Protected environments

Working with environments

Environment rollback

Retry or roll back a deployment

Environment URL

Going from source files to public pages

Stopping an environment

Stop an environment when a branch is deleted

Stop an environment after a certain time period

Auto-stop example

Delete a stopped environment

Delete environments through the UI

Delete environments through the API

Prepare an environment

Grouping similar environments

Environment incident management

View the latest alerts for environments (ULTIMATE)

Auto Rollback (ULTIMATE)

Monitoring environments

Embedding metrics in GitLab Flavored Markdown

Web terminals

Check out deployments locally

Scoping environments with specs

Environments Dashboard (PREMIUM)

Limitations

Further reading