How To Manage Experiences in Staging & Production Environments

Option 1: Adjust Delivery Rules

In the case where you have a staging environment and a production environment with different subdomains, you can adjust the delivery rules in the deliver tab of the Lou Builder to unpublish an experience from staging and publish to production.

Once your experience is ready to be moved from staging to production, all that needs to be done is to change the URL to your production environment subdomain. To make an experience live in staging and production, duplicate the experience and set the URL on one to staging and production on the other. In this case, we recommend clearly labeling your experience as ‘staging’ or ‘production’ to minimize confusion.

Pros and cons to adjusting delivery rules:

Pro: Quick and easy to move between staging environment and production environment

Con: Can be confusing/unclear at first glance which environment an experience is published in

Option 2: Create Two Lou Accounts

Managing two separate Lou accounts is another way to differentiate a staging environment vs. a production environment. The downside to this strategy is that any experiences that are built in the staging account can not be carried over to the production account. The experiences would have to be rebuilt the same way in both your staging and production account.

Pros and cons to managing two Lou accounts:

Pro: Data is kept completely separate & there's a clear distinction between what’s in a staging environment vs. a production environment

Con: Have to build experiences twice (one for each account)