Lesson 3: Adding a release environment to the release

Add a release environment to the Demo Release's DEV phase.

The tutorial assumes that you are doing each lesson in the order it is presented. Before you start this lesson, make sure that you complete the previous lessons.
A release environment represents a deployment target. When you run a deployment, you designate a phase and one of the release environments associated with the phase. So, before you can run a deployment, you need to add at least one release environment to the phase you intend to use.

When you add a release environment to a phase, you reserve it for a specific period. If other releases or phases reserve the environment during the same period, messages alert you to possible conflicts. You can run deployments for release environments with potential conflicts after first ensuring that no actual conflicts exist. This situation might happen, for example, if you reserve an environment for several phases for testing.

Release environments also assign application environments to a phase. Although IBM™ UrbanCode™ Deploy applications are not covered in this tutorial, release environments play a central role in application management. Applications are covered in a later tutorial.

In this lesson, you add one of the default release environments to the Demo Release's DEV phase.

  1. From the IBM® UrbanCode Release dashboard, click Releases and Deployments, and then click the name of the release you created in Lesson 1, Demo Release.
    The Release Detail page is displayed.
  2. Click the New Environment Reservation tool for the DEV phase, as shown in the following figure:

    The New Environment Reservation tool
    The New Environment Reservation window is displayed, as shown in the following figure:

    The New Environment Reservation dialog

    The DEV-1 release environment is one of the default release environments. After you become familiar with IBM UrbanCode Release, you can create your own release environments. You can add several release environments to a phase, and a release environment can be added to more than one release.

  3. In the Start Date list, select today's date.
    You can select the first day that you want to reserve.
  4. In the End Date list, select a date that is a day after the Start Date.
    The End Date must be the same or later than the Start Date. The two dates define the reservation period.
    Note: You can run deployments for the release environment outside of the reserved period. However, you risk unexpected conflicts when you do that. It's better to modify the reservation period, which informs other users that you intend to use the environment.
  5. In the Environment column, select DEV-1.
    You can reserve more than one release environment for a phase. If anyone else reserves the DEV-1 environment during your reservation period, they receive an alert, and the potential conflict is listed in the Notes column.
  6. Click Save.
    The DEV-1 environment is listed in the Application Environments column. In a typical release, you add release environments to all phases in the release. That way, you can run deployments for all lifecycle phases.

Lesson checkpoint

In this lesson, you added a release environment to one of the Demo Release's phases.

You can now schedule deployments for the Demo Release's DEV phase by using the DEV-1 release environment. Because you didn't reserve environments for the release's other phases, you cannot yet schedule deployments for them.

The Release Detail page for the reserved release environment is shown in the following figure:


The Demo Release with the DEV-1 release environment reserved

Before you schedule a deployment for the DEV phase, you need to add tasks to a deployment plan. You add tasks to the Default Plan in the next lesson.