Deploy to Acceptance Environment
How to deploy to the Acceptance environment on a licensed node.
Overview
There are two environments on a licensed node, Acceptance and Production. This describes how to deploy to Acceptance.
See Deploying an App to the Mendix Cloud for more.
1. Create Deployment Package
A deployment package is essentially a .zip file containing all the files needed to deploy your project on a Java application server. After creating the deployment package, you transport it to the server where it will run.
After you link your application to a licensed node, there will be no deployment packages yet in the Acceptance environment. To get to the Acceptance environment, navigate to your project from My Apps or from Buzz (projects listed on the right side) and select Environments from the left side menu. It should look like this:
1. Select "Create package from teamserver".
2. On the "Choose a tag" page fill in the "New version" field with something like 1 0 0 or 0 0 1 for your initial version. Mendix uses semantic versioning for projects with the first number for a major version, the second for a minor version, and the third for a patch version.
3. Select the button "Build this revision". It will take a minute or two to package your project so it can be transported to the application server.
4. When the package is built, select the "Deploy" button.
2. Transport to Acceptance
Once the deployment package is built, transport it to the Acceptance server.
Select the "Transport" button on the Acceptance environment line.
You will be warned that the first deployment will take a while because it has to initialize an application server and database server before your deployment package can be transported and unpackaged. This can take 10 minutes or so. Server initialization only happens on the first deployment.
After it initializes the servers, it will end with an error because it didn't actually transport the deployment package to the new server. This is normal. Select the "Transport" button on the Acceptance environment line again and it will move the package to the server properly. This can take a minute or so.
3. Start Server
Once the deployment package has been transported to the application server, unpackaged, and deployed, you will start the application. Select the "Start application" button. On subsequent builds this step will show a "Restart application" button instead. This can take a minute or two.
The restart process is the only time your application will be down and unavailable to users.