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Managing Production + Test Environments

  • December 19, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 17 views

Browsing around the community it doesn’t seem like Zapier has an effective solution for managing multiple environments.

 

One stop-gap I’ve implemented that could ease the pain for those who have control of both the inbound and outbound data could be to simply introduce a “CONFIG” table with the appropriate values for the given environments.

 

I take my payload and embed an “$env” into the body, then look up the configuration in the CONFIG table, using the pre-configured values from the config table I point the rest of my integrations accordingly.

 

I decided against having multiple tables for tracking the full workflow and opted to instead add the “$env” value as part of the lookup key for the time being

 

Not perfect as changes to the workflow impact all of my environments simultaneously, but it beats retesting a 76-step workflow every time I want to make a small change and push it to my environments.

 

For those without the ability to change the body can also create multiple ingress zaps that act as proxies and simply mutate the request body before forwarding it to the main pipeline. Very clunky for a simple config switch, but at least gives some move forward options.

 

Want to see if anyone else ran into something or encountered any issues with this approach.

 

I’d also like to throw my hat in for something akin to the system variables feature but for environments

2 replies

Riley Holden

You’re not wrong but the pain you’re describing isn’t really an “environment variables” problem

 

What’s missing is a promotion boundary.

 

Right now all of your environments still share the same decision graph. The $env flag just changes routing, but any structural change still mutates every environment simultaneously, which is why you’re forced to retest the full 76-step chain

 

That’s also why this feels fragile, config tables help with values but they don’t protect structure.

 

In systems that scale, environments aren’t just config switches, they’re separate authorities:

 

  • dev is allowed to change structure
  • prod only accepts promoted, frozen structure
  • promotion itself is a deliberate action, not an edit

 

Zapier doesn’t really support that model natively, so people end up reinventing it with flags, proxies, or duplicated zaps.

 

Your approach is one of the cleaner hacks I’ve seen, but the main risk is exactly what you already noticed, structural changes still leak everywhere.

 

Curious, have you thought about freezing prod as a read-only execution pipeline and treating promotion as a copy/replace event rather than an edit-in-place? Even if it’s manual, it usually reduces retest surface dramatically.


drtanvisachar
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Hello ​@kn327 

Zapier does not have true environment support today and most complex Zaps end up using a workaround like this.

A config table with an env key is a solid and fairly common pattern. Just make sure the lookup fails clearly if the env value is missing so you do not route test data into prod by accident. The proxy Zap approach is clunky but valid when you cannot control the payload.

There is no native dev test prod separation yet so your request for environment level variables makes a lot of sense.

Helpful references:

https://help.zapier.com/hc/en-us/articles/8496306920461-Store-and-retrieve-data-with-Storage-by-Zapier

https://help.zapier.com/hc/en-us/articles/8496288693133-Use-Paths-by-Zapier-to-control-workflows