Environments

Managing prompt deployment across different stages of your development lifecycle.

Environments in Freeplay allow you to control how and where prompt versions are deployed throughout your development workflow. By configuring environments, you can safely test changes, manage multiple deployment stages, and maintain different versions of prompts for various use cases.

Common Use Cases

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Many teams make use of prompt bundling in production. See our guide on Prompt Bundling for reference.

Staged Deployment

The most common use of environments is to create one for each environment that teams use. For example if your team follows a typical testing, staging, production environment flow, you would create a tag for each.

This provides you the ability to rapidly test and iterate with the "test" environment tag and then once a new prompt version is ready, you can promote it to staging and finally production.

Shadow Testing

Create a tag for your main prompt and a secondary tag to run new or experimental versions to compare performance without affecting user experience. Log interactions from both versions to evaluate and monitor improvements before full deployment.

Rapid Iteration

Teams commonly create a "sandbox" or similar testing environment that allows team members to rapidly iterate on prompts without impacting other environments. Team members can use the "latest" tag for this or create their own to prevent overlapping with others.

Feature Flags & A/B Testing

Use environments to manage feature rollouts or run A/B tests. Deploy different prompt variants to specific environments and route traffic accordingly based on your testing strategy.

Setting Up Environments

Navigate to Settings > Environments to view and configure your environments.

Freeplay includes three default environments:

• latest - Automatically assigned to newly created prompt versions. Ideal for initial testing and development work.
• dev - Development environment for active iteration and experimentation.
• prod - Your stable, live environment serving end users.

You can customize these environments or create additional ones to match your team's workflow.

Deploying Prompts to Environments

When you create or edit a prompt template and save a new version, Freeplay automatically assigns it to the latest environment. To deploy a prompt version to a different environment:

1. Open the prompt template
2. Select the version you want to deploy
3. Choose your target environment & select Deploy

The next time this prompt is fetched from Freeplay it will use the current deployed version! Only one version of a prompt can be deployed to each environment at a time.

Using Environments in Your Code

We recommend setting your environment tags os environment variables so they do not change for production deployments, while for quick testing you can easily set in code:

# Fetch the latest version
formatted_prompt = fpClient.prompts.get_formatted(
    project_id=project_id,
    template_name="your-template-name",
    environment="latest",
    variables=prompt_vars
)

# Fetch the production version
formatted_prompt = fpClient.prompts.get_formatted(
    project_id=project_id,
    template_name="your-template-name",
    environment=os.getenv("FREEPLAY_ENVIRONMENT"),
    variables=prompt_vars
)

// Fetch the latest version
const formattedPrompt = await fpClient.prompts.getFormatted({
    projectId: projectId,
    templateName: "your-template-name",
    environment: "latest",
    variables: promptVars
});

// Fetch the production version
const formattedPrompt = await fpClient.prompts.getFormatted({
    projectId: projectId,
    templateName: "your-template-name",
    environment: process.env.FREEPLAY_ENVIRONMENT,
    variables: promptVars
});