Environments

In Lowcoder Enterprise Edition, we introduce the concept of Environments — also referred to as Instances or Stages — to support professional-grade development workflows across multiple deployment layers (e.g., Development, Staging, Production).

These are isolated but connected deployments of Lowcoder that allow you to develop, test, and release apps and their dependencies in a controlled and auditable way.

An Environment represents a full, self-contained instance of Lowcoder, with its own MongoDB Meta-Database. It can be a single-docker or a multi-docker installation.

A typical setup contains 3 stages:

Environment	Purpose
Development	Build and test new features, apps, queries, or UI changes safely
Test / QA	Preview and validate deployments in a production-like setting
Production	Live environment used by end-users or business-critical applications

Environment Isolation with Selective Deployment

To avoid chaos from accidental deployments, Lowcoder introduces:

• Managed vs. Unmanaged Objects

  • All apps, queries, and data sources start as unmanaged

  • You explicitly mark them as managed to indicate that they are deployment candidates

• Selective Deployments

  • You choose which managed objects to deploy

  • Dependent objects (e.g., queries, data sources) are automatically bundled and deployed or matched if they already exist in the target environment

This ensures you only move forward the artifacts that are ready — no unintentional deployments or inconsistent app states.

Lifecycle Flow Example

1. Developer builds a new app in the Dev environment

2. App gets marked as Managed

3. Developer clicks “Deploy to Staging”

4. Lowcoder copies the app and all required objects to the Staging environment

5. QA verifies it and then pushes the same version to Production

Each step is auditable, and consistent — just like enterprise-grade deployment pipelines, but fully visual and no-Git-required.

Why Not Git-based CI/CD?

In traditional CI/CD, Git is often used as the control mechanism. However, Lowcoder supports deeply linked, runtime-bound components like:

• Shared data sources used across multiple apps

• Dynamically generated queries

• User-created runtime components

Pushing only an app’s DSL (App-JSON) into Git would miss its operational context. Therefore we offer Lowcoder’s native environment-aware transport system that’s UI-driven, selective, and dependency-aware.