Introduction to Development Workflow
The Studio, from your schema definitions and configuration, defines the structure of your content, enforces the rules and validation of that content, and allows you to customize the editorial interface for how your editors interact with and manage that content. You can think of the Studio as a customizable "window" through which your editors interact with Content Lake. Sanity provides a unique architecture that decouples the content editing experience in the Studio from the underlying content storage in the Content Lake.
One of the key benefits of this architecture is that the Studio's schema and configuration live entirely in code, which means you can manage them in source control and test any changes as part of your regular development and QA process.
In other words, a solid development workflow allows you to:
- Develop and test new features in an isolated environment separate from production
- Promote changes from development to production environments in a controlled manner
- Allow content editors to continue their work uninterrupted in the production environment while development is ongoing
By setting up separate development and production environments, along with processes to migrate code and content between them, you can establish a smooth flow from development to release. This ensures that new features are properly tested before reaching production, and that content editors always have a stable production environment to work in that is insulated from development activities.
According to Atlassian,
DevOps is a set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams. It emphasizes team empowerment, cross-team communication and collaboration, and technology automation.
Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) automates the development workflow above and allows developers to iterate quickly, catch issues early, and deliver new features seamlessly. Integrating the development and content workflows through CI/CD empowers developers and content editors to collaborate effectively on delivering new experiences. Developers can focus on building and shipping features, while content editors can create and manage content without disruption. This setup provides a robust foundation for ongoing development and content operations to occur in parallel–all in service of enabling your organization to realize its business goals.
In the upcoming lessons, we'll walk through the specific steps to configure your Sanity project with multiple environments and datasets to support this development workflow. You'll learn how to structure your project, manage datasets, and deploy Studios. By the end, you'll have a the foundations of a setup to confidently develop and ship ongoing improvements to your project.