Guidance on, or best practices for, selective device deployment and/or staging vs. production scenarios

Product support
1

Hello!

I’m looking for some guidance or insight into managing deployments. I’m wondering if there’s a way to deploy an update to a single device in a fleet. For example, 10 devices, running the same containers/nodejs code but that have different use-cases. Is it possible to only update a single device in the fleet, without forcing the whole fleet to update when the deployment is pushed via git.

In terms of having a staging and production environment, is it common practice to add multiple remotes to the same codebase, for example git remote add Balena-staging ... and git remote add Balena-production, each of which represents a different Balena cloud app?

3

Yes, there is! Check the scripts in the staged releases repo:

Of course, as a sample project, you don’t have to use those scripts as they are (though you can): ultimately they build on the balena API, so if you wish, you can re-write parts of it in your chose programming language, to integrate with your deployment process.

In terms of having a staging and production environment, is it common practice to add multiple remotes to the same codebase, for example git remote add Balena-staging ... and git remote add Balena-production , each of which represents a different Balena cloud app?

Two parts to this one:

  • Using different balena applications for staging and production: this sounds like a reasonable and logical way of going about it and I should think it is common practice, though I’ll let anyone else chip in with further advice.
  • Using git different git remotes: this is probably common if you are using the “git push” deployment method, but I believe that most “advanced” users use the balena CLI for all the additional features it offers in relation to deployments: private docker registries, build secrets, local image builds, build on dedicated hardware, mix of cloud and on-premises and so on. All achieved with the different commands:
    • balena push deviceIp
    • balena push appName
    • balena deploy
    • balena deploy --build
    • balena build -h hostaname -p port

Check these docs for a bit more info on the deployment options:

6

Perfect, thanks @pdcastro