nself promote

Promote environment configuration and secrets from dev to staging, or staging to production. Shows a diff first so nothing surprises you.

Quick start

# Promote dev config to staging (with diff preview)
nself promote staging

# Promote staging config to production
nself promote prod

Synopsis

nself promote <ENV> [FLAGS]

Description

nself promote copies environment configuration from one tier to the next in the nSelf environment cascade: dev → staging → prod. Before making any changes it shows a color-coded diff of all values that would be added, changed, or removed so you can review the impact.

The promotion copies non-secret config values automatically. Secrets (values that match the secret pattern defined in your stack config) are flagged in the diff and require explicit confirmation before promotion, or can be excluded entirely with --skip-secrets.

Source and destination are derived from the target environment:

Subcommands

nself promote staging

Promote dev configuration to staging.

nself promote staging

Example diff output:

Promoting dev → staging
─────────────────────────────────────────────
+ FEATURE_NEW_ONBOARDING=true           (new)
~ HASURA_GRAPHQL_MAX_CONNECTIONS=20     (was: 10)
- LEGACY_PAYMENT_ENDPOINT               (removed)
! SMTP_PASSWORD=••••••••                (secret — will prompt)
─────────────────────────────────────────────
4 changes (1 new, 1 changed, 1 removed, 1 secret)

Apply? [y/N]

nself promote prod

Promote staging configuration to production. Requires a second confirmation for the promotion step, since production changes are irreversible until manually reverted.

nself promote prod

Example diff output:

Promoting staging → prod
─────────────────────────────────────────────
+ FEATURE_NEW_ONBOARDING=true           (new)
~ HASURA_GRAPHQL_MAX_CONNECTIONS=20     (was: 10)
─────────────────────────────────────────────
2 changes

This promotes to PRODUCTION. Type "yes" to confirm: 

Flags

Examples

Review what would change before promoting

nself promote staging --dry-run

Promote only a specific set of keys

nself promote staging --only FEATURE_NEW_ONBOARDING,HASURA_GRAPHQL_MAX_CONNECTIONS

Promote without secrets (let ops team handle secrets separately)

nself promote prod --skip-secrets --yes --confirm-prod

CI deployment pipeline

# After staging tests pass
nself promote prod \
  --skip-secrets \
  --yes \
  --confirm-prod \
  --json > promote-audit.json

Promote and restart services in one step

nself promote staging --yes && nself restart --env staging

Environment variables

• NSELF_PROMOTE_CONFIRM — set to yes to skip interactive confirmations (equivalent to --yes --confirm-prod). For automated pipelines only.

Exit codes

• 0 — promotion applied successfully
• 1 — promotion cancelled by user or error
• 2 — invalid arguments or unknown target environment
• 3 — source environment has unresolved conflicts

Related

• nself env — view and set individual environment variables
• nself deploy — deploy the stack to staging or production
• nself restart — restart services after env changes