Clone an Environment

Engine Yard provides a clone feature that takes an environment and creates a new standalone copy. When an environment is cloned, nearly everything including the volumes that your original environment uses, are copied, excluding cron jobs and custom files such as custom Chef recipes.

An excellent use case for cloning an environment is creating an on-demand staging environment from your production application. This relieves the chore and cost of maintaining a full-time staging environment and provides the flexibility of spinning up an environment on-demand within a matter of minutes.

Note: The option to Clone an Environment will only be enabled if there are snapshots of your environment.

To create a clone

1. Log in to your Engine Yard account.
2. Navigate to the dashboard.
3. Navigate to the environment you want to clone by clicking on the environment name.
4. Click Clone Environment.
   The Create a clone page appears.
5. Enter the information necessary for your cloned environment. (See Clone options below.)
6. Click Clone Environment.
   Engine Yard clones the environment, provisions the servers, and deploys the application.
7. If needed, add cron jobs or custom Chef recipes to the cloned environment.
   Important! Metadata, cron jobs and custom Chef recipes are not cloned.
8. Note that the instances are provisioned using the exact same stack as the original environment.
   If you need to upgrade the stack, click Upgrade now.
9. Verify that the snapshot settings are appropriate for the purposes of your cloned environment.
10. Test your cloned environment as necessary.

Tip: If you create a clone for staging/testing, remember to shut down the clone after testing is complete. Also delete unused IP addresses to avoid unnecessary charges.

Clone options

• Name for new cloned environment

  Use underscores to separate words instead of spaces. Common environment names are: myapp_staging, myapp_testing, myapp_qa, myapp_ci, etc.

• Rails/Rack Environment

  Enter the environment (variable) name. Example: production, development, testing, staging, etc.

• Network

  Choose the Network/VPC that the clone environment should be provisioned under. Be aware that by default environments in different VPCs cannot talk to each other over the private network.

• Choose IP address

  Select the IP address you want to use or (optionally) opt to use a public Amazon hostname.

• Domain name for …

  Enter the domain name to associate with this environment. Leave this blank if using an Amazon hostname.

If you have feedback or questions about this page, add a comment below. If you need help, submit a ticket with Engine Yard Support.