How do I stage changes to my site to make sure things are working?

Support
#1

I don’t want to take my site offline every time I want to test changes to the store. What is the procedure for having a staging site to test changes without changing production live?

#2

The exact details of setting up a staging environment are going to depend on how you’re developing and deploying your website.

Most likely, you’ll need to deploy a domain that uses your Production API key and deploy a domain or subdomain that uses your Test API key.

On your Snipcart dashboard, you can toggle between Live and Test to see the API key for each environment (note: both of these environments are “alive” simultaneously. The toggle just changes which environment you are viewing)

I’ll also share with you what I’m doing for my own website:

  1. In my code repository, I have a master branch and a develop branch.
  2. When I commit/merge changes to my develop branch, it launches a build process that is configured to use my development environment variables – for Snipcart, it uses the Test API key. This is deployed to https://dev.mydomain.com where I can verify that changes are working correctly
  3. After verifying changes to my develop branch, I commit/merge changes to my master branch which it launches a build process that is configured to use production environment variables – for Snipcart, it uses the Live API key. This is deployed to https://mydomain.com
#3

Okay, thanks. For some reason, I was thinking the test/live toggle switched live on and off. It’s good to know it doesn’t do that.

Cheers.

#4

You’re welcome, glad that’s all it was! I was unsure of that when I first starting using Snipcart as well :grin: