Deployments & environments

Environments

An environmentis an isolated context for running a project's services — for example a local environment for development and a remote one for production. Each environment holds its own configuration and its own set of deployments, so the same design can run in several places at once without interference.

Deployments

A deployment represents a running instance of a service in an environment. Deployments track:

• Status — one of PENDING, RUNNING, FAILED, STOPPED, or STOPPING.
• Logs — output captured as the deployment starts and runs.
• Outputs — values a service produces once it is up, such as a connection string or a public URL.
• Environment variables — the configuration injected into the running service.

Environment variables

A deployment's environment variables are computed from two sources, which Dreambase merges into a single effective set at deploy time and whenever an input changes:

• Connector-derived — when a service depends on another (a connectorfrom the dependent to the dependency), the dependency's outputs are mapped onto variable names. A web app connected to a database can receive a DATABASE_URLfrom the database's connection-string output automatically.
• User-provided (service-scoped)— variables you set directly on a service. These are defined per service, in addition to the design/environment variables, and are managed from the service's Env Vars tab in the node details panel.

Service-scoped variables behave just like design/environment variables, with two switches:

• Single value — the same value in every environment, versus a distinct value set per environment.
• Sensitive — the value is encrypted at rest and masked in the UI and API responses.

A value can be a literal or a reference to a design/environment variable written as {{env.KEY}}, which is resolved for the deployment's environment when the effective set is computed. Whenever these variables change, Dreambase re-computes the effective set for the running deployment and emits a DEPLOYMENT_ENV_CHANGED event so the hosting service can apply the update.

Local vs. remote

Running a project locally deploys its services on your own machine — Docker-image services through Docker, codebase services from their repositories. Publishing to a remote environment hands each service to the appropriate platform service, which provisions and runs it in the cloud.

Insight at a glance

Whichever environment a deployment lives in, the app gives you quick insight into health, logs, and metricsacross all of a project's services. Health is kept current by the Monitoring service, which checks each deployment on a schedule and reports the result back into Dreambase.