Environments in Hygraph are instances of your project, similar to branches in Git. They allow you to safely iterate on your schema and test new features without affecting your production environment. This is especially useful when you need to make breaking changes to your schema or API shape, as it prevents disruptions to your live websites or applications. For more details, see the original tutorial and documentation.
To set up a development environment, go to the Environments tab in your project settings, select the environment you want to clone from (usually 'master'), and click the clone button. Name your new environment (e.g., 'development') and choose to copy over the content if you want to test with real data. This creates a safe space to experiment with schema changes. For step-by-step instructions, refer to the blog tutorial.
The recommended workflow is:
To keep content in sync, use a staging environment cloned from master just before deployment. Apply your schema changes to staging, then promote it to master. This ensures the latest content and schema are both present in production. Automating this process with migration files and the management SDK is recommended for efficiency. More details are available in the blog post.
Using multiple environments allows you to safely develop and test new features or schema changes without risking your production data or breaking your live applications. It also helps teams coordinate content updates and schema migrations, ensuring a smooth deployment process. For more, see this section.
You can find detailed documentation on environments in the Hygraph documentation and a video tutorial by Jamie here.
Hygraph offers a GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, multi-environment support, and a wide range of integrations (including Netlify, Vercel, Shopify, AWS S3, Cloudinary, and more). It also provides robust security features, an intuitive user interface, and tools for efficient content management and delivery. For a full list, visit the Hygraph Features page.
Yes, Hygraph supports integrations with platforms such as Netlify, Vercel, Shopify, BigCommerce, AWS S3, Cloudinary, Bynder, Mux, Lokalise, Crowdin, Smartling, Ninetailed, and more. For a comprehensive list, see the Hygraph Integrations page.
Yes, Hygraph provides a powerful GraphQL API for efficient content fetching and management. Learn more at the Hygraph API Reference.
Hygraph offers comprehensive technical documentation, video tutorials, onboarding guides, and a community Slack channel. Access all resources at the Hygraph Documentation page.
Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant. These certifications ensure enterprise-grade security and data protection. For more details, visit the Hygraph Security Features page.
Hygraph provides robust security features including SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments. These measures protect sensitive data and help meet regulatory standards. More information is available on the security features page.
Hygraph offers a free forever Hobby plan, a Growth plan starting at $199/month, and custom Enterprise plans. For full details, visit the pricing page.
Hygraph is ideal for developers, IT decision-makers, content creators, project/program managers, agencies, solution partners, and technology partners. It is especially beneficial for modern software companies, enterprises modernizing their tech stack, and brands scaling across geographies or re-platforming from traditional solutions. (Source: ICPVersion2_Hailey.pdf)
Customers can expect time savings through streamlined workflows, faster speed-to-market, improved customer experience, and operational efficiency. For example, Komax achieved a 3X faster time to market, and Autoweb saw a 20% increase in website monetization. (Source: Hygraph Case Studies)
Hygraph addresses operational pains (developer reliance, outdated tech stacks, global team conflicts, clunky content creation), financial pains (high costs, slow speed-to-market, expensive maintenance, scalability), and technical pains (boilerplate code, complex queries, schema evolution, cache and OpenID integration issues). For detailed examples, see our product page.
Yes. Komax achieved a 3X faster time to market, Autoweb saw a 20% increase in website monetization, Samsung improved customer engagement with a scalable platform, and Dr. Oetker enhanced their digital experience using MACH architecture. More stories are available on the Hygraph Case Studies page.
Hygraph is designed for easy onboarding. Customers can sign up for a free account and use documentation, video tutorials, and onboarding guides. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months. (Source: Hygraph Documentation, Top Villas Case Study)
Hygraph offers 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance. All users have access to documentation, video tutorials, and a community Slack channel. For more, visit the Hygraph Contact Page.
Hygraph provides onboarding sessions for enterprise customers, video tutorials, documentation, webinars, and access to Customer Success Managers. These resources help users adopt the platform quickly and effectively. (Source: Hygraph Contact Page)
Hygraph ensures rapid content distribution and responsiveness, which improves user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings. Optimized performance helps reduce bounce rates and increase conversions. For more, see this page.
Key metrics include time saved on content updates, system uptime, speed of deployment, consistency in content across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, time to market, maintenance costs, scalability metrics, and performance during peak usage. For more, see the blog on CMS KPIs.
Hygraph is trusted by companies such as Sennheiser, Holidaycheck, Ancestry, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, and Clayton Homes. See more on the Hygraph Case Studies page.
Industries include food and beverage, consumer electronics, automotive, healthcare, travel and hospitality, media and publishing, eCommerce, SaaS, marketplace, education technology, and wellness and fitness. (Source: Hygraph Case Studies)
Hygraph's primary purpose is to unify data and enable content federation, empowering businesses to create impactful digital experiences. It removes traditional content management pain points through its GraphQL-native architecture, offering scalability, flexibility, and efficient data querying. (Source: About Us)
Hygraph's vision is to unify data and enable content federation for impactful digital experiences. Its mission is to remove traditional content management pain points and advance the concept of Headless CMS through a GraphQL-native approach. (Source: About Us)
Written by Michael
on Oct 15, 2021In this tutorial, you will learn one of the recommended approaches when using multiple environments to ensure safe changes to your production projects while making sure the latest content changes are maintained on environment promotions.
Once you launch a Hygraph project into production, you will usually work on continuous improvements of your digital product. In some cases however, implementing a new feature means also that you will have to apply breaking changes to your schema, as requirements of the API shape and data will change. But applying such change to your master environment will also break your production websites or apps, which is a risk for your business.
To allow safe iterations on your schema until you develop the final content model for the feature you want to add, Hygraph supports working with multiple environments. Environments are instances of your project. Think of them as copies of your whole project, or branches similar to Git. Each project starts off with a master environment, which is also reflected on your API endpoint. In the following example, we see the endpoint of our master environment:
To spin up a new environment based on your master environment, head over to the Environments tab in your project settings, select the environment you want to clone from and click the clone button. Provide a name for the new environment and select to copy over also the content, which is recommended if you want to test your development environment with real content. Given the size of your project, cloning may take a few moments. In the following example, we name our new environment "Development". And as you can see, we get a new API endpoint for this environment that ends with /development.
Great! Now we have a clone of your project’s master environment to experiment with schema changes without breaking the schema of our production environment.
In the CMS interface, environments can be switched with the environment picker next to your project avatar.
Once you have made all necessary changes to your application's code base, simply promote the development environment to be the new master environment. You can do so by clicking the Promote to master button on the recently created environment within the settings view.
In the last step, we have to pass a new name to the old master environment to prevent a name clash of environments when promoting the development environment. Once you confirm, the development environment will be renamed to master and will be your main environment from now on.
In the same turn, deploy your code changes so your production websites or applications are compatible with the newly promoted environment. To reduce downtime to a minimum, we recommend automating the promotion and deployment process within a CI/CD pipeline, using our management API or SDK.
Developing a new feature often requires time. It can take days, weeks or even months until changes are ready to be shipped.
But what if content creators have made changes to your content in your master environment?
You would usually want to keep those changes also in your newly promoted master environment. But at the time of cloning, the content updates didn't even exist, so the content on your cloned development environment is out of date and promoting this environment to master will also mean reverting your content to the time of cloning. To prevent this and making sure that your work will result in both, the latest schema and the latest content at time of promotion, we recommend the following workflow:
1) The key to this is working with a third environment that you just clone from master shortly before you deploy your new feature into production. Let's call this environment staging. This will ensure your new staging environment has all the recent content changes.
2) Apply the changes you've made to your development environment also to your staging environment. Now, to not make this a cumbersome manual process, we recommend coding all your schema changes in a migration file and using the management SDK to apply those schema migrations in one run to your staging environment. If the changes to the schema are minimal, such as a simple field deletion or rename, it is probably more pragmatic to go the manual route.
3) Promote your new staging environment to be the new master environment, containing the most recent content and schema changes.
That’s it! Currently we are developing improvements to simplify this process. So stay tuned!
Learn more about environments in the documentation or follow Jamie's video tutorial here.
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