After you install for the first time, a local development environment is created for you, with a temporary pre-deploy-to-production branch (more on branches later).
Your first objective should be to deploy to production.
Deploying to Production
Forest Admin is meant to help you manage your operations: this can only happen if you work with your Production data! To do so, you need to create your Production environment.
Click "Deploy to production" on the top banner or in the Environments tab of your Project settings.
Deploy your admin backend
On the first step, you need to input your admin backend's URL. This is the URL of the server onto which you have deployed (or will soon deploy) your admin backend's code base:
If you need help deploying your admin backend's codebase, here are 2 step-by-step guides showing how it can be done on Heroku or on a standard ubuntu server.
Note that for security reasons, your admin backend must use the HTTPS protocol.
The URL must not end with a trailing /.
Connect to your database
On the next step, you need to fill out your Production database credentials:
Your database credentials never leave your browser and are solely used to generate environment variables on the next step, so they are never exposed.
Set your environment variables
The final step requires that you add environment variables to your server. Follow on-screen instructions:
Once your node server is successfully detected and running with the indicated environment variables, a "Finish" button will appear. Click on it to finalize the creation of your Production environment.
Creating a remote environment
Now that your admin panel is live in production, you might want to add an extra step for testing purposes. Forest Admin allows you to create remote (a.k.a staging) environments.
To create a new remote environment, go to your Project settings (1):
Then from the Environments tab, click on "Add a new environment" (2).
You can choose to deploy to a remote (staging) environment before going to production (see below), it's up to you.
Choose your environment name
You'll first be asked to input the name of the remote environment you wish to create:
Enter your admin backend's URL for that environment
Deploy your admin backend to your new server - your staging server for instance - then input its URL:
Connect to your database
You need a separate database for this new environment: if you're creating a Staging, then it must be your staging data, so your staging database!
Your database credentials never leave your browser and are solely used to generate environment variables on the next step, so they are never exposed.
Set your environment variables
The final step requires that you add environment variables to your server. Follow on-screen instructions:
Once your node server is successfully detected and running with the indicated environment variables, a Finish button will appear. Click on it to finalize the creation of your new remote environment.