Promoting projects to production

When a project is ready to be promoted to production, there are often reasons to continue experimenting with the model even after the project is deemed production-grade. When that happens, it's often useful to make sure others with access to the project do not haphazardly or accidentally make changes to the production version.

In Domino, you can use the Organizations feature to accomplish this. If one does not already exist, create a new organization that will contain only projects that are production-ready, or already in production. Transfer ownership of your production-grade project to this organization before you begin experimenting.

Note: All Domino users with access to this organization should clearly understand its purpose.

To experiment on this project, fork it into a new project, following the process described in the official Domino documentation, and conduct your experiments in the new project.

When you are ready to merge your changes back into the original, production-grade project, click on Request Review to submit a merge request to the project owner.

Note: The process of forking and merging is covered in detail in the official Domino documentation. If you are not familiar with the process, we recommend you consult that link before trying it yourself.

Some Domino customers do this even for models that are not actually in production, as a way of submitting their work to their managers.

Other ways to promote to production

While changing organizational ownership of a project is usually the simplest way to promote a project, Domino offers three other methods.

Change Results Behavior

By saving runs to isolated branches instead of in the main line, you can ensure that the results of each run will be independent from each other, and not synchronized. One user’s run will then have no impact at all on the next user’s run.

To change results behavior, first click Settings in the left-hand sidebar. Then, in the Project Settings window, click the Results tab.

Under Results behavior, select isolated branches.

Exporting the Project

You can also use Imports/Exports to export files from your production-designated project into a separate working project. The code in the original designated project would then be read-only, while any actual code execution would occur in the working project.

To use this feature for promoting a project to production, click on Imports/Exports in the left-hand sidebar. Then, under Exports, check the checkbox labeled Files. This will ensure that any project that imports this one will use the current set of files for your production-designated project.

Create and name a new project, and then import the files from your original, production-designated project. This new project will be your working project.

Additionally, you can use Domino’s run tagging feature to let users in the working project select which version of the production-ready project they’d prefer to use. Simply assign the “release” tag to any runs you want to make available to these users.

Project Tagging

A third way to promote a project to production is to use Domino’s Project Tagging feature to designate a project as being production-ready. However, this option is only available for on-premises or private deployments.

Click on Overview in the left-hand sidebar. In the box labeled Select Tags, begin typing the appropriate tag (“prod” or “promote,” for example).

If the tag has already been used, Domino will prompt you with an auto-fill option for the Select Tags text box. Otherwise, you will have the option to add a new tag.

Once the project is tagged, make sure all users with access to the project understand the tag’s meaning.