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So far you’ve been working locally. This step covers deploying your Forest back-end to production and understanding how Forest’s development workflow keeps your environments in sync.

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Understand environments and branches

Forest distinguishes between environments (your local dev, staging, production) and branches (layout and configuration changes in progress).
  • Your production environment is the live back-office your team uses
  • Your development environment is your local Forest back-end
  • Branches let you make layout changes without affecting production until you’re ready to deploy
This means you can iterate on your back-office configuration safely, then push changes to production when they’re ready. In development you work on a local back-end and a layout branch; the branch is pushed, reviewed, and deployed to the live back-office, while your back-end code is deployed to the production back-end in your infrastructure

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Deploy your back-end

1

Deploy your back-end to your infrastructure

Host your Forest back-end on any platform that can run a Node.js application (AWS, Heroku, GCP, your own servers, etc.).Make sure to set the environment variables (FOREST_ENV_SECRET, FOREST_AUTH_SECRET, DATABASE_URL) in your hosting platform.
2

Create a production environment in Forest

In Forest, go to Project Settings → Environments → Add environment.Give it a name (e.g. “Production”) and enter the URL where your back-end is running.
3

Deploy your layout

In the Forest UI, go to Environments and click Deploy to production to push your layout configuration (segments, UI customizations, workspaces) to production.
Your team can now access the production back-office.
For a full explanation of the development workflow, branches, schema updates, environment management, see Developer Workflow.

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What’s next

Production is live. Time to invite your team.

Next: Invite your team →

Add users, create teams, and set up permissions