Using environments for deployment

About environments

Environments are used to describe a general deployment target like production, staging, or development. When a GitHub Actions workflow deploys to an environment, the environment is displayed on the main page of the repository. You can use environments to require approval for a job to proceed, restrict which branches can trigger a workflow, gate deployments with custom deployment protection rules, or limit access to secrets. For more information about creating environments, see Managing environments for deployment.

Each job in a workflow can reference a single environment. Any protection rules configured for the environment must pass before a job referencing the environment is sent to a runner. The job can access the environment's secrets only after the job is sent to a runner.

When a workflow references an environment, the environment will appear in the repository's deployments. For more information about viewing current and previous deployments, see Viewing deployment history.

Using an environment in a workflow

You can specify an environment for each job in your workflow. To do so, add a jobs.<job_id>.environment key followed by the name of the environment.

For example, this workflow will use an environment called production.

name: Deployment

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  deployment:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment: production
    steps:
      - name: deploy
        # ...deployment-specific steps

When the above workflow runs, the deployment job will be subject to any rules configured for the production environment. For example, if the environment requires reviewers, the job will pause until one of the reviewers approves the job.

You can also specify a URL for the environment. The specified URL will appear on the deployments page for the repository (accessed by clicking Environments on the home page of your repository) and in the visualization graph for the workflow run. If a pull request triggered the workflow, the URL is also displayed as a View deployment button in the pull request timeline. When using the "Require deployments to succeed before merging" rule, only the name specified is being checked even if a URL has also been specified. See About protected branches.

name: Deployment

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  deployment:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment: 
      name: production
      url: https://github.com
    steps:
      - name: deploy
        # ...deployment-specific steps