Shopify Hydrogen App Help: Oxygen Deployments and Environments

These jobs sit between writing the storefront and running it in production. They are short, but mistakes here show up on launch day.

Linking the project. The Hydrogen CLI's link command connects a local project to a storefront in the channel, or creates a new storefront.

Merge-to-deploy. Shopify recommends its GitHub integration, which deploys automatically on every merge or push to the connected repo. Teams on BitBucket or GitLab need a custom CI/CD pipeline built on the Hydrogen CLI.

Branch-to-environment mapping. Production follows the default branch, each custom environment follows one branch of its own, and preview catches every other branch.

Variables and secrets. API keys belong in environment variables marked secret, which hide the value after saving. Deployments are immutable, so a changed value needs a redeploy.

Who sees previews. Deployments are private and need a staff login by default. Shareable links let reviewers in without an account.

Release recovery. Production and custom environments can roll back to an earlier deployment without deleting anything.

The storefront code itself. Routes, components, caching and search markup are full development projects. Hydrogen development specialists take those on.

Plenty of React developers can build a Hydrogen storefront on a laptop. Fewer have run one on Oxygen for months. Ask about operations, not just code.

How do releases reach production? Good: the GitHub integration or a CLI-based pipeline, with merges deploying. Weak: someone running deploy commands by hand before each release.

How does a changed API key go live? They should know each deployment keeps the variables it was built with, so the key is updated in the admin and the affected environments are redeployed.

What does a rollback do? It repoints the environment URL and deletes nothing, and the next push to the linked branch moves it forward again. A careful developer checks the older deployment's variables first, because they may be out of date.

Where do logs go? Oxygen keeps runtime logs for up to one month. A busy store wanting longer history needs a log drain.

Previews are not search tests. Oxygen adds a disallow rule to shared deployments' robots.txt, so judging search behavior from a shared preview tells you nothing.

A scoped first task. Link the project, connect GitHub, add a staging environment with its variables, and send you a shareable preview link. It is small, testable and reusable.

Public environments by plan. One on Starter, Basic, Grow, Advanced, Pause and build, and Plus Partner Sandbox stores. Shopify Plus gets 25. Development stores and trial plans get none. Retail, nonprofit and custom plans include one.

Two environments are permanent. Production and preview are required and can't be deleted. Custom environments are optional.

Variable caps. Each environment holds up to 110 unique environment variables. Oxygen adds seven required ones, six of them read-only; SESSION_SECRET is the editable one.

Private costs speed. Environments are private by default, and private deployment URLs load more slowly because authentication is checked on each route.

Sharing needs Basic or above. Shareable links carry a token that bypasses login, and changes to them take up to 30 seconds to apply.

Redeploys and rollbacks. Both work for production and custom environments only, never preview.

Retention. Deployments stay accessible for at least six months, and the ten most recent per environment are always kept.

Each of these can be quoted separately from the storefront build.