How to set up staging envs procedures

[runleonarun]

Contributions

We should add more context and possibly these two procedures somewhere. One exists in paragraph form on the environments page, but maybe they both should become procedures?

• I have read the contribution docs, and understand what's expected of me.

Link to the page on docs.getdbt.com requiring updates

docs.getdbt.com/docs/deploy/deploy-environments

What part(s) of the page would you like to see updated?

From initial customer beta feedback, I think there are two legitimate patterns:

1. Production = default branch (main)
   • point Development + Staging to staging branch
   • point Production to main
   • promote to Production by merging from staging -> main
2. Staging = default branch (main)
   • point Development + Staging to main branch
   • promote to Production by cutting "release" branches/tags off main at a regular interval (daily, weekly)
   • update Production environment (via dbt Cloud Admin API) to point to latest "release" branch/tag

Right now we've documented (1) here. I don't want to add too much complexity here, but we should mention that it's not the only legitimate/supported pattern.

Additional information

#5356 (comment)