Create and manage deployments for your Google Chat app

  • Manage your Google Chat app's lifecycle by creating separate deployments for development, staging, and production environments.

  • Create a distinct Google Cloud project for each deployment, using unique app names, avatar URLs, and descriptions for clarity.

  • Deploy changes progressively through each environment, starting with development and moving to staging before releasing to production.

  • For Apps Script projects, maintain separate projects for each environment due to their single-branch limitation.

  • Utilize different Pub/Sub topics for individual deployments to ensure environment isolation.

This page explains how to create and management deployments for your Google Chat app. By maintaining different deployments, you can better manage each phase of your Chat app's lifecycle and safely release changes to production.

Create deployments for each phase of the app lifecycle

To manage your Chat app throughout its lifecycle, we recommend that you create and deploy a Chat app for each of the following environments:

  • Development: The environment that you use to work on changes. If needed, you can use the head deployment or run this environment locally.
  • Staging: The environment that you deploy to trusted testers for end-to-end testing. This environment should be as close to production as possible.
  • Production: The environment that you deploy to end users by publishing your Chat app to the Google Workspace Marketplace.

For each Chat app that you deploy, you must create a Google Cloud project. When you configure the Chat API in each Cloud project, consider using a distinct app name, avatar URL, and description so that you can better distinguish between the Chat apps in Google Chat.

In the following example, the Chat app called Task app is built on HTTP and uses different endpoints to deploy to development, staging, and production:

Environment Cloud project name App name HTTP endpoint URL
Development task-chat-app-dev Dev Task app http://example.com/api/myapp/head
Staging task-chat-app-staging Staging Task app http://example.com/api/myapp/staging
Production task-chat-app Task app http://example.com/api/myapp/

Manage deployments based on your Chat app architecture

The following table includes additional considerations when managing deployments for specific Chat app architectures:

Architecture Deployment format Considerations
HTTP HTTP endpoint URL
  • Deploy changes progressively to each endpoint in your Chat app's lifecycle. For example, after you've tested a new feature deployed in your staging endpoint http://example.com/api/myapp/staging, release the feature to production by deploying it to your production endpoint, such as http://example.com/api/myapp.
  • To debug code before deploying, you can set an endpoint to your local environment. To learn how to test changes locally, see Debug Google Chat apps.
Google Apps Script Deployment ID
  • Apps Script projects can only have a single branch and be associated with one Cloud project. To test changes and maintain multiple environments, you must create different Apps Script projects for each environment.
  • You should only use the Apps Script project's head deployment for the development environment. For staging and production environments, use versioned deployments. For details, see Create and manage deployments in the Apps Script documentation.
Pub/Sub Pub/Sub topic You should use a different Pub/Sub topic for each deployment.