How to manage different datasets in development and production environments in Sanity.io

I'm trying to figure out how to have different versions in development and production/staging. Please help.
Is the dataset only the data or does it also include the code (the objects and schemas and everything built for the studio)? Do I do

sanity deploy

to two different adresses for my code if I want to deploy to development/production?
If I have for example two different datasets, how do I know which one is managed in the Sanity Studio? Or will there e.g. be two different studios with different addresses?

Hi Anna, the dataset only holds your content, not your Studio code. There is no need to deploy separate Studios for different environments. Instead, you could switch between datasets depending on the environment instead.
Let’s say you have two datasets:

development

and

production

. You can then use environment variables to load the correct one. To do so:• Create two files in your Studio root folder:

.env.development

and

.env.production

(mind the dot at the beginning of the filenames)• In each of these files, set

SANITY_STUDIO_API_DATASET

to the appropriate dataset, for example:

SANITY_STUDIO_API_DATASET="production"

• Depending on whether you run

sanity start

(development) or `sanity deploy`/`sanity build` (production), it should now use the correct dataset.In addition to the above, you can also set up so-called
Spaces to easily switch between datasets within the Studio itself: https://www.sanity.io/docs/spaces .
Finally, if you’d like to make it more visible for yourself or other editors what the active environment/dataset is, you can use the env variables mentioned above to update the logo for example:

Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any questions.

Thank you for the answer! What if I also have a staging environment? Can I give the

sanity deploy

the environment as a parameter?

You can also override the dataset via the command line. For example:

This above command gives me the error

Am I missing something?
I have set up the .env files and the Spaces functionality works.

Are you running the command from your Studio root folder?

Yes from the same folder where the sanity.json is located.

Without quotation marks and such, correct? What’s the exact command you are running?

SANITY_STUDIO_API_DATASET=development sanity deploy

Looks right to me, so this is strange. What versions of Sanity are you on? (

sanity versions

)

Could you try running

sanity upgrade

to see if that makes any difference? I just ran the exact same command locally and it seems to work, so let’s try to narrow down on the possible causes 🙂 Edit: you already have the latest Sanity CLI it seems so no need. Thinking what else the issue could be here.

I ran the upgrade, but still get the same error message 🤔

Where are you running the command? i.e. what application

Where are you running the command? i.e. what application

Where are you running the command? i.e. what application

windows command prompt

Could I use something else that might work? I would really need to deploy this :)

You could set the dataset to staging in your sanity.json file in the meantime for this particular deployment. I think there might be an issue with the PATH environment variable on Windows, but I’m not too familiar with Windows setups to resolve this easily.

Do you mean here:

Indeed, if it’s for this specific deployment that should work, although I understand if you’d like to make this more flexible afterwards.

Hold on, if you still have the .env.production file with a different dataset defined there, that one takes precedence. So you would have to rename that file temporarily OR set

staging

in there instead.

Do I need to remove the "__experimental_spaces": [ part?

No need 🙂

ok, I will change the .env.production file to development as well.

But yes, it would be nice to have it working a bit more smoothly 🙂

*development indeed. Let’s figure out how to resolve the terminal issue afterwards, because the command should work the way you used it.

ok. so now I only run
normally (when I have changed the .env. production file), correct?

That’s correct!

That’s correct!

Hmm... it gives an error: Unauthorized - Session not found...

Jep, worked 🙂 Thank you for the help!

Hello again . I still need to clarify a thing with the deployment.
I now have run

sanity deploy

and have renamed the .env.production to .env.productiontemp (and have in both files

SANITY_STUDIO_API_DATASET="development")

. I have been under the impression that when I run

sanity deploy

, it is deployed only to the development side. But now when I switch to the production dataset with the "spaces" functionality, I can see also there all the new document types and objects etc (not any content though, because we have not put any content there yet). Is this the way it is supposed to work? I thought the idea was to deploy new things first to staging and then to production.
So now I am wondering, after we take the production dataset to use for real and I make a change in the studio code and do

sanity deploy

to staging, can I break something in the production site if it is automatically reflected there as well? If I e.g. change the name of some property or remove some object from a document type or something.
What exactly differs when I deploy to staging/production datasets (if not the documents types, objects and models etc defined in the studio code)?

Hi , I'm still wondering about this thing in my last comment, and I'm soon to make new changes. I hope you can find the time to give me a quick answer 🤞🤔
Also was the terminal issue solved, that it does not work on windows command prompt?