Ephemeral environments in Octopus Deploy allow to you automatically create test environments on-demand to gain confidence in your changes while helping to keep your infrastructure costs down.
Support for Ephemeral Environments is rolling out as an Early Access Preview to Octopus Cloud.
Ephemeral environments are designed to be created and removed as part of testing changes within the development lifecycle.
Releases can be deployed to in the same way as long-lived environments such as Staging or Production, and provide additional capabilities to provision and deprovision infrastructure associated with the environment using Runbooks.
Getting started
Ephemeral environments are configured within Projects, see the Getting Started guide.
Scoping variables, deployment targets and accounts
Ephemeral environments will be created and removed regularly as part of testing changes. To avoid requiring ongoing configuration of variables, deployment targets and accounts, ephemeral environments are represented by a Parent Environment.
Parent environments are configured alongside existing long-lived environments in the Octopus Web Portal but have key differences:
- Parent environments cannot be used in lifecycles.
- Parent environments cannot be deployed to.
Parent environments can be selected alongside existing long-lived environments in the following areas of Octopus:
- Deployment targets
- Accounts
- Certificates
- Variable sets
- Project variables
- User roles assigned to teams
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Page updated on Monday, September 8, 2025