New Application Environments
I'm trying to figure out the correct workflow when setting up a new application and i'm a little confused about environments.
What is the correct way of setting up environments for a new application? Currently my experience looks like this:
- Sign in to my kinde account, or create an account
- Add a new business for my app
- Navigate to that business and select start project from scratch
- Select Nextjs as the framework
- select social providers and email
- Select connect to get to the quick start where I can copy all my env vars and “start quickly”
This seems really easy and simple, but I’m automatically put into my production environment with no other environments available. I think I actually want a localhost environment to test things out with. So then I:
- Add environment (local or dev or something)
- Switch to that environment
I have a backend and a frontend application in this new environment even though I only had a next.js environment in my initially setup production environment.
- Delete the frontend app
- Go to settings/authentication to add social connections
- select the backend app
- Select Nextjs as the framework and go through the quick start
It seems easy to just use production but a bit awkward to get a dev environment the way i'm doing it
14 Replies
Hey @saM69420,
To help you out further, are you able to explain a bit more about:
1. WHat you are building?
2. What each application represents?
This will help me guide you on the best workflow for what you are trying to achieve.
Any type of web application that needs user auth and management and each application would be separate from each other.
Imagine I have a bunch of side projects or startup ideas and I'm using kinde for each of them. What should I do when I'm making a new app.
Hey @saM69420,
Do you have a different userbase for each application, or the same userbase/userpool?
And whenever you create a new environment it creates 2
applications (backend and frontend) by default to make it general.
What would you expect to happen in regards to applications when you create a new environment.Different user base for each application (project)
When I made a new environment, I expected it to copy the other environment, so just a next app would exist.
When I made a new environment, I expected it to copy the other environment, so just a next app would exist.Understood, I will pass this feedback on.
Different user base for each application (project)In this case, I would suggest having a different business per product/application.
When i'm testing locally, I'm going to need local API keys and localhost urls for callbacks in kinde and for the social providers. I'm assuming that creating a new environment would be the correct way of doing this, but maybe i'm wrong
With clerk for example, I get a development environment, then when I'm happy with everything, I copy it to a production environment
Perfect 👌
Totally understand where you are coming from, duplicating environments is on our radar and would solve this experience you are after.
I have noted your name down against the duplicate environment feature request.
Thank you
In the mean time, should I keep doing things the way I've been doing things?
It's working for me but it feels weird when i'm teaching other people how to use kinde. It's so easy to get to the production environment and a lot more clicks to get a dev environment setup
Yep the way you have been doing at the moment is ideal. You can always use your Kinde Management API to do everything you can do in the Kinde Admin (https://kinde.com/api/docs/#kinde-management-api) - e.g. add applications, edit callback URLs.
So you could implement logic in the Kinde Management API to clone another environment, but I would not suggest you doing this currently, as I dont believe the effort of this would be worthwhile over just the current method you have undertaken.
It's working for me but it feels weird when i'm teaching other people how to use kinde. It's so easy to get to the production environment and a lot more clicks to get a dev environment setupIm curious, if you don't mind sharing, who and how are you teaching others how to use Kinde?
College and YouTube. I'm an instructor and a YouTuber
The audience is student and jr devs, maybe intermediate. Sometimes I'm in a consulting position giving tech advice/teaching
Love to hear that you are showing your love for Kinde to amazing developers.
I totally understand that the current experience for environments is far from ideal, I will raise this with my team.
In the meantime I have noted down your request.
Thank you, mostly I wanted to make sure I'm doing things correctly or get advice on how to do things better if i'm not. The process I have made me feel like maybe I wasn't supposed to setup multiple environments.
For a moment I thought about setting up multiple next.js applications in the same environment to solve my problems
It sounds like you are doing exactly what you need to do within the current state of our system.
Please continue to reach out for feedback like this, we are always listening 👂
Would love to see these improvements for environments too.
Just wanted to say that it's so cool that we have API access for everything already though. Your documentation on Postman maps pretty well to the RapidAPI macOS client (formerly Paw).
The web UX is a bit tedious atm, but it's reassuring to be able to compare and look at the diffs between environments using the API. Nice job ❤️