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Environments

An environment is a space where your application data is stored, managed and your application's RESTful services are executed. Constrained by your account plan, you can create separate environments for development, test, and production versions of your app.

An environment hosts only one snapshot, and an environment is bound to a geographic location (e.g., US Central, Germany, Singapore). When you create an environment for your app and deploy a snapshot, service requests to that specific app snapshot will be routed only to datacenters in the environment's geographic location.

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You can deploy/redeploy a snapshot to an environment and, if needed, undeploy it from an environment. You can choose to delete all application data during undeployment or keep the data intact and deploy a newer version of the snapshot to continue using existing data.

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Excluding the environments tagged as production, you can enable auto-redeployment of your snapshots to environments where all application design changes are automatically deployed within seconds.

API keys​

Each environment can have a set of API keys. API keys are unique codes used to authenticate requesting parties' access to your application's services through endpoints.

  • A valid API key may or may not be required to consume your application services. You can specify whether an endpoint requires an API key or not. An API key can be provided either in the Authorization header of a request or in the query parameter of the endpoint path with apikey as the parameter name.
  • API keys are only valid in the environment in which they were created. Therefore, you cannot use an API key created in one environment to access the services of another environment.
  • You can create full access, read-only, custom allowed endpoints, or custom excluded endpoints access keys with or without a set expiration date.
  • An API key can be called from all domains or only from "Authorized Domains". Altogic allows consumers of your application services (e.g., frontend app, other backend apps) to use "Authorized Domains". In such a case, your application endpoints must be called from Authorized Domains, otherwise, Altogic raises an error.
  • You can suspend an API key. Suspending an API key disables all endpoints of the application, and no app services can be accessed with the suspended key.

Param overrides​

App parameters are name-value pairs that can be used in defining expressions and designing application services and tasks. You can define the default application parameters at the application level and override them at the environment level.

Connection overrides​

External connections are the configuration settings to connect your apps to legacy email and database servers. These settings are primarily used by nodes while designing your services. You can define the default external connections at the application level and override them at the environment level.

Endpoint documentation​

When you deploy a snapshot of your application to an environment, Altogic can automatically generate the API documentation of your app. For each enabled endpoint with an associated service, the API documentation includes the following information:

  • The URL of endpoint and URL path parameter details
  • Information on endpoint authentication requirements (e.g., API key, session token, app role)
  • Query string parameters and their types
  • Headers and their types
  • Request body structure including file uploads and JSON content
  • Response codes and response body format for each response codee