Promote assets between environments

When you build in Itential Platform, you typically work in a development environment, a dedicated instance of the Platform where it’s safe to create, test, and iterate. When your assets are ready, you need to move them to other environments, typically staging and then production, each of which is a separate Platform instance.

This movement is called promotion. It’s directional by design: assets flow from development toward production, never the other way. A customer running two Platform instances (one for development and one for production) has two environments. A customer running three instances has three.

The assets you can promote include:

• Studio Projects, which bundle workflows, forms, transformations, and templates.
• Golden Configurations.
• Lifecycle Manager (LCM) resource models.
• Operations Manager automations.

Understand your promotion tools

There are three ways to move assets between environments.

• The Platform UI is the built-in export and import interface in each Itential Platform application, such as Studio and Operations Manager. You export an asset from the source environment, which downloads it as a file, then import that file into the target environment. No additional tooling is required, but the process is manual and doesn’t scale well.

• ipctl is Itential’s open-source command-line tool that you can use to manage assets. Its copy command connects directly to two Platform environments and moves assets between them without requiring you to manually download and re-upload files. ipctl also supports export and import commands for git-based workflows. See the ipctl repository for installation instructions.

• CI/CD pipelines automate the entire promotion workflow. Itential provides an asset repository template with ready-made pipeline definitions that trigger deployments based on git tags, with no manual steps required once configured.

Choose a promotion method

Your choice depends on whether you have a git repository and whether you need automated deployment.

Itential recommends Option three. Git-based promotion with CI/CD gives you version history, automated validation, consistent deployments, and a clear audit trail for every change that reaches production. Options one and two are valid starting points if your team isn’t ready for CI/CD.

Promote assets in the right order

Assets in Itential Platform reference each other by name. A workflow can call a transformation, use a template, and trigger an Operations Manager automation, all defined as separate assets. If you promote the workflow but not the assets it depends on, the workflow will import successfully but fail at runtime in the target environment.

For example, promoting a “Network Provisioning” workflow without first promoting its “Parse Device Config” transformation means the workflow arrives in production with a broken reference. The import won’t warn you. The failure only surfaces when someone runs the workflow.

Promote assets in the following order to ensure every dependency exists before the assets that reference it. Organize your Studio assets into Projects rather than the global space, since ungrouped assets are harder to export and promote.

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