Environments Interface

Leveraging Environment Variables for Seamless Releases

Environments in Parloa provide a structured framework to manage and organize your development, testing, and production stages. They serve as containers that hold a set of parameters, configurations, and environment variables that define the behavior of your releases.

Understanding Environments

An environment is essentially a context within which your bot operates. You might have different environments for development, staging, and production, each with its own settings that dictate how the bot behaves and interacts with other services.

The Advantages of Environments

• Facilitate simultaneous development on multiple releases.

• Maintain separate configurations without the need to adjust code or settings within the bot's logic.

• Enable quick switches between different stages of your deployment process.

Introducing Environment Variables

Within these environments, environment variables are employed. These variables are a specialized subset designed to maintain consistency across your project’s various environments. They allow the use of uniform variable names while assigning specific values according to each environment's context—be it Staging, Production, or any custom environment you create. These variables are pivotal in managing configuration values such as URLs, API versions, and authentication tokens.

Creating Environments Variables

To create an environment:

1. Navigate to Environments –> click on Add New Environment.

2. Provide a name for your environment in the Enter an Environment Name field:

   

   Warning: Variable names cannot be changed. Name your variable carefully to ensure clarity and consistency across your project's lifecycle.

3. Click Create, then enter the environments variables and their corresponding values.

   

Making an Environment Variable a Secret

We recommend marking any sensitive value as a Secret for enhanced security.

To convert an environment variable into a secret:

1. Check the Secret checkbox next to the relevant value.

2. A confirmation pop-up will appear to verify that you want to mask the value. Click the Mark as Secret button.

   

Once marked as a secret, a variable's confidentiality setting is permanent across all environments. If you accidentally set a value as Secret, you must delete the value and recreate it. Marking a value as Secret is irreversible.

Editing a Secret Environment Variable

To edit theSecret value of an environment variable:

1. Click on the edit icon next to the value:

   

2. You can view the characters of the value by clicking on the eye icon.

   
3. Edit the value as needed, and click Save to update the value.