Chapter 3. Mastering environments and the development workflow
This chapter covers
- Creating build distributions and workflows
- Setting up application environments
- Building secure environment configuration
- Automating first-time setup
- Using Grunt for continuous development
We spent the last chapter going over what to do and what not to do during builds. We covered build tasks and configured different targets in them. I also hinted at how your workflow differs according to whether you build your application for debug or release distributions; these differences in your build workflow, based on either debug or release goals of your target environment, are called build distributions.
Understanding the interaction between development, staging, and production environments and build distributions is vital to creating a build process that can be used regardless of environment, allowing you to develop your application in a setting loyal to what your end users will see, but that can still be debugged with ease. Additionally, this understanding will allow you to create middle-tier environments, which are instrumental to robust deployment mechanisms, which we’ll discuss in the next chapter.
In this chapter we’ll start off learning what we mean by environments and distributions, and I’ll propose a typical configuration that should suffice for most use cases, where you’ll have your