We already have running apps on render : a staging app (starter plan) and a production one (pro plan).
Both are deploying master branch (production only after a manual promotion)
We now would like to deploy our pull request branches as well using preview environments , with starter plan apps, but I’m getting confused with render.yml file: I can see that I can put different settings between preview and normal app (plan and starterPlan) but if I do so both my staging and production apps would share the same plan setting which is not what I want.
Good question @cblavier! Currently we don’t have great support for using Blueprints (that is resources defined in a render.yaml file) to create both preview environments and a dedicated staging environment. We definitely see the merit of a setup like this and plan to improve on the status quo. In the meantime, there are some potential workarounds:
Create a staging branch in your repo and keep a pull request (and therefore a preview environment) open for this branch at all times. You would open PRs against staging and then merge staging into master as the promotion step.
Define the production environment manually and then the staging + preview environments with a Blueprint. The downside of this approach is that you’d have to manually update your production resources to keep them in sync with the render.yaml file.