Step 4: Creating an Environment

An environment is a collection of resources that represent deployment targets–physical machines, virtual machines, databases, J2EE containers, and so on. Each application must have at least one environment defined for it. Agents are associated with applications at the environment level. Agents are distributed processes that communicate with the Deployment Automation server and perform the actual work of deploying artifacts. Generally, an agent is installed on the host where the resources it manages reside.

Before an application can run, it must have at least one environment created for it. An environment defines the agents used by the application, among other things.

To create an environment:

Navigate to Management > Environments.
Click the Add button and then select Create Environment.
The name you enter in the Name field will be used in the deployment. In this example, we'll create an environment named DV1.
Select a color to provide a visual identifier for the environment in the UI. Typically, each environment will be assigned its own color.
To start configuring the environment you just created, click Build Out.

Typically you create several environments, as you may need to deploy your application and test it in a number of different environments. You can create pipelines to predefine the sequence of environments and approval points. For this example, we'll simply create a single environment, so no pipeline is needed.