Testing multiple environments
Sometimes you want a Quix Streams client to initially use one environment, and then configure it to work with another environment. This is sometimes done to test different environments. This can be achieved by simply changing the streaming token used to authenticate your Quix Streams client.
In Quix Streams a streaming token is used to authenticate Quix Streams with a specific environment.
Tip
Quix Cloud automatically injects the streaming token inside the Quix Streams configuration using the Quix__Sdk__Token environment variable. Note that the streaming token is also known as an SDK token.
Token is scoped to an environment
Each streaming token is scoped to one environment - this is the environment in which it is obtained. For example, if you obtain the token from your production environment, then it is scoped to work only with that environment.
Using .env and the Quix CLI to select an environment
If you are working locally you may to point to different environments while you are developing your pipeline.
You can use the Quix CLI to select the environment you want to connect to, and it will manage your .env file configuration for you.
First you use the quix use command to select your environment. Then you run quix local variables export inside your application folder which generates the .env file to configure the streaming token of the selected environment.
Tip
This command is run automatically by your IDE if you have configured it previously with the command quix local init, for example, quix local init --vscode.
You might want to connect to a local broker for testing and development. Use the quix context broker set command to set up your local broker configuration.
You can then switch from a local broker to the Quix Cloud environment using quix context broker toggle.
Tip
Use quix context current to check which environment or local broker you are pointing to.
Passing token to the Application object
Alternatively, you can specify the SDK token directly in your client code. This is done when creating the Application object in your Quix Streams client, for example:
This value overrides the Quix__Sdk__Token environment variable, which is set for you automatically when running code in Quix Cloud, or any local environment you may have set through using Quix CLI or environment files or variables.
Topic names across multiple environments
Topics have a topic name and a topic ID. The topic name is a short textual name which may be the same across multiple environments. The topic ID uniquely identifies the topic across all organizations, projects, and environments.
As streaming tokens are scoped to a specific environment, it means you can specify a topic name, even if that same topic name is used across multiple environments. This is because the topic ID is automatically used for you, based on the streaming token used. For example, if you had a topic called f1-data in production and development environments, you could simply use the topic name of f1-data in your code, regardless of the environment you're connecting to. In production, the topic ID might be orgname-projectname-prod-f1-data, and in development it might be orgname-projectname-dev-f1-data, however, the correct topic ID is automatically used by Quix Streams, as the environment is identified in the token, and therefore the correct prefix to the topic name can be generated.