Deployment automation for vault setup

Question

Hi community and M-Files, 
 As we are heading to setup multiple M-Files environments and have recently faced the fact that admins need to be on the server to import vault configurations, I am wondering if there is any way to automate deployment of vault configurations (import functionality in admin). 
 Our idea would be to save the exported packaged into Git, take it automatically and upload it on specific server and vault. Does anyone do anything similar or how do you automate deployments? 
 Regards, 
 Dejan

Joonas Linkola · Answer

If you mean the vault structure, you could set up replication via cloud storage between the development environment and the production vaults. Note that for instance vault applications and their configurations are not part of replication, those you have to install separately to each vault. Cloud storage for replication is provided by M-Files and included in all subscriptions without additional cost. 
 I wouldn't recommend completely automating this structure replication (ie. expecting any change made to the dev vault to be immediately replicated to prod) as you probably want to have some control over when and what is deployed, but you could set up a scheduled export job in disabled mode in the dev vault and then run it manually whenever you are ready to deploy changes. On the production vaults the import job could monitor the cloud storage folder every 5 minutes for instance. 
 More information on the cloud storage in chapter 5.7 of M-Files Replication and Archiving User's Guide . 
 Some best practices related to deploying controlled changes between environments can be found in M-Files Best Practices - Applying Controlled Changes to an M-Files System . This has been written with highly regulated industries in mind and your deployment process likely doesn't have to be as heavy, but I'm just leaving it here since there may be some good tips in there anyway.

Deployment automation for vault setup

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