Staging

Staging provides the ability to build, deploy, and run Jovo apps in different environments, including local development.

Most Jovo projects start with local development. After a while, the app needs to get deployed somewhere for testing, later for production use. While already being deployed, there might be some local development going on.

For use cases like this, Jovo offers different staging features that make it easier to have different app versions depending on a stage as well as different project versions (e.g. different Skills in the Alexa Developer Console).

The app configuration is usually spread across multiple files:

• app.ts: Default configurations
• app.<stage>.ts: Stage-specific configurations

For example, new Jovo templates come with an app.ts for all default configurations that should work across stages (platform integrations, components, ...) and an app.dev.ts file that comes with specific configuration for local development (FileDb, Express server and the Jovo Debugger).

Stage-specific configurations get merged into the default app.ts config.

You can create a new stage file using the new:stage command:

$ jovo new:stage <stage>

# Example that creates a new app.prod.ts file
$ jovo new:stage prod

This command also lets you specify which server integration should be used for that stage.

Learn more about app staging in the app config documentation.

The project configuration can contain multiple stages for different deployment environments. Depending on the stage, the build command then creates different files into the build directory.

Here is an example that uses different Alexa Skill IDs and endpoints for a dev (local development) and a prod (deployed in production) stage:

const project = new ProjectConfig({
  // ...

  defaultStage: 'dev',
  stages: {
    dev: {
      endpoint: '${JOVO_WEBHOOK_URL}',
      plugins: [
        new AlexaCli({
          skillId: 'devSkillId',
        }),
      ],
      // ...
    },
    prod: {
      endpoint: process.env.ENDPOINT_PROD,
      plugins: [
        new AlexaCli({
          skillId: 'prodSkillId',
        }),
      ],
      // ...
    },
  },
});

Learn more about project staging in the project config documentation.