Adding and using multiple environments

Enterprise

Each assistant has a draft and live environment. For Enterprise plans, you can add up to three environments as a staging area to test your assistant before deployment. You can build content in the draft environment and test versions of your content in the extra environments.

For more information about environments, see Environments.

Adding environments

Each new environment appears as an extra tab on your Environments page. You can't reorder these environments, so add them to match your test-to-deploy lifecycle.

To add an environment:

Open the Environments page and click Add Environment.

Add environment
Enter a name and a description, then click Save. Names can't contain spaces or use any special characters.

Add an environment

The new environment appears as an extra tab on your Environments page.

Using your environments

You can use extra environments in your development and test process before you deploy an assistant for customer use.

Add extra environments to match your existing test-to-deploy process. For example, you might name and use five environments in a scenario like this:

Example
Environment	Used for
Draft	Conversation authors build actions and test as they work
Review	Conduct an initial content review with stakeholders
Test	Test assistant content on a configured channel
Staging	Use a staging website to test assistant content and channel configurations
Live	Deploy for customer use

Access control to environments

You can control who can work in each environment. Each environment has an ID that you can use in IBM Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) and set access by resource. For more information on access control, see Managing access with Identity and Access Management. For more information on settings, see Environment settings.

Publishing content to an environment

For more information, see Publishing your content.

To publish new changes from the draft environment to an environment:

If changes are available to publish, click Publish.
Enter a description of the version.
Choose an environment.
Click Publish.

To publish an existing version to an environment:

On the Environments page, click the environment tab.
In Resolution Methods, click Switch version.
Choose a version to publish, then click Switch version.

Moving a version through multiple environments

This example explains moving a content version through multiple environments to build, test, iterate, and deploy.

Example
Environment	Activity
Draft	Publish version V3 to Review environment
Review	Conduct initial testing of V3
Test	Switch to version V3 for further testing with a configured channel
Staging	Switch to version V3 for testing with an internal staging website
Live	Switch to version V3 for customer use
Live	Switch to version V2 after a bug is found in version V3
Draft	Revert to version V3 to fix the bug. For more information, see Reverting to a previous version
Draft	Publish version V4 to Review environment for retesting
Test	Switch to version V4 for further retesting
Staging	Switch to version V4 for testing with an internal staging website
Live	Switch to version V4 for customer use

Previewing an environment

On each environment tab, you can click Preview this environment to open another browser tab and preview your assistant as an interactive web chat widget.

You can share this unauthenticated version of your assistant with your team by sending them the link to the environment preview. Your subject-matter experts can test your in-progress assistant without needing access to watsonx Assistant itself.

Environment settings

Each environment has its own settings. Click the Settings gear icon to open the settings.

Example
Setting	Description
API Details	Environment name and ID, session URL, and a link to the IBM Cloud console to see the service credentials for your instance
Webhooks	Settings for pre-message, post-message, and log webhooks. For more information, see Extending your assistant with webhooks.
Inactivity timeout	Specify the amount of time to wait after the customer stops interacting with the assistant before the session ends. The maximum inactivity timeout differs by service instance plan type. For more information, see Inactivity timeout.
Session history	For each environment, you can record the recent messages from the conversation for each customer, for use with the `session_history` variable. For more information, see Session history.
Edit environment	Change the name or description of the environment. Names can't contain spaces or use any special characters.
Delete environment	If necessary, you can remove the environment. Any channel or extension configurations are removed. Deleting an environment doesn't delete any published content versions. They remain in your list of published versions.