The Development Environment

Introduction

When you create a project in Catalyst, it is created in the development environment by default. All actions that you perform in Catalyst, such as creating a table, configuring an Event Listener, integrating your GitHub account, and hosting a mobile app are only reflected in the application’s development environment.

The actions performed from the Catalyst CLI such as creating a function or deploying a web client are also only reflected in the development environment. Similarly, when you perform actions using the APIs, they will be reflected only in the development environment.

After you deploy your application to production, you can switch to the development environment any time to work on your application without affecting the live production mode. All feature creations, changes, deployments, testing that you perform in the development environment, and data that you create will not be reflected in your live application until you deploy them.

Limitations

The development environment is provided as a sandbox where you can perform iterative testing and bug fixes on your application. You must therefore use this environment only during the development phase, and not use it permanently as an alternative to production. Catalyst will not be able to guarantee a permanent uptime for this environment.

As mentioned earlier, the development environment also comes with several storage, feature, and API limitations in various components. Certain components are unavailable in the development environment and can be accessed only from the production. These limitations are mentioned in each component help page.

The API limits in the development environment apply to all components and features of your project. Catalyst currently enables you to make upto 200k API calls for a single application in the developer environment. These limits will be applied to each application you create in a phased manner, based on your usage pattern. If you require a raise in the API limits for an application, you can contact Catalyst support at support@zohocatalyst.com with your request. We will evaluate your application and its usage pattern, and take up your request on a case-by-case basis. You must use the development environment keeping these limitations in mind.

Function URL and Web App URL in the Development Environment

When you host a web app in the development environment, the web app URL that is generated for the web app will be of the format: https://project_domain_name.development.zohocatalyst.com

The invocation URL of Basic I/O functions will be of the format: https://project_domain_name.development.zohocatalyst.com/baas/v1/project/project_ID/function/function_name/execute

Similarly, the invocation URL of Advanced I/O functions will be of the format:https://project_domain_name.development.zohocatalyst.com/server/function_name/

You can obtain the development web app URL from the Web Client Hosting component, and the function URLs from the respective function’s page.

After you deploy your application to the production environment, the production URL endpoints for all of your Basic I/O and Advanced I/O functions, and the web client, will be generated.