Test/Dev Cloud Instances

[Charisma Riley]

Hi there! My company is interested in creating a test/dev version of our live Confluence site, but have little-to-no information on how to begin creating this since we are on Confluence Cloud. Any resources and/or advice is appreciated. Thank you!

[Andy Brook · Accepted solution]

Why dev? you're not really in control of the 'host' application and upgrades etc, its done for you, part of the 'cloud' benefit  If you want to test stuff out, you could do it in the same instance.  If you really want to test new cloud addons and so on, sure, go ahead and signup for another 10$ limited user instance dev-yourcomany.atlassian.net 

Without specific context on your expected usage, its a bit hard to suggest much else.

[Charisma Riley]

To test/work on things like workflows, re-designed pages, and space reconfiguration before making it all live. So it doesn't freak anyone out haha. Everything a test environment is for!

[Andy Brook]

you can do all that in a new space. but its 10$ to play in a new sandpit :)

[Charisma Riley]

Oh so you suggest just making a new space in Confluence to test stuff, you mean? Rather than a new site, is that correct? That kind of makes sense. Thanks!

[Daniel Eads]

Hey Charisma!

As Andy suggested, we do see a lot of folks using copies of spaces in their Cloud instances for testing. The points about not needing to test upgrades / plugin versions are spot-on. You can copy a space, name it something like "TEST Spacename", then lock down the permissions to just the people who would be testing if you like. In general, having a staging/test server is always a good idea for our Server products. But for Cloud, you can get by without a separate instance.

If you do go down the route of having a separate test instance, you can use the export/import tools to bring data from your production Cloud instance into test.

Cheers,
Daniel

[Andy Brook]

Yea, and do please bear in mind that such a backup/restore in cloud, when restored, it will get its "shared_secret" rest (its used as part of authenticating with cloud addons) such that all cloud addons that your instance 'had' in prod will no longer be available or usable, and some to/fro will be needed to get things running.

[Charisma Riley]

This is incredible! Thank you all for all the awesome advice! I will get something up and running here, thanks to you all. Appreciate it.