Glean Multi-Environment Setup

Overview

Glean enterprise search requires environment isolation to prevent test data from polluting production search results. Each environment uses its own datasource names, API tokens, and connector configurations. Sandbox indexes synthetic test documents, staging indexes a curated subset of real documents for search quality validation, and production indexes the full corpus. Connector changes must be tested in staging before promotion to avoid breaking search relevance for end users.

Environment Configuration

const gleanConfig = (env: string) => ({
  development: {
    apiToken: process.env.GLEAN_API_TOKEN_DEV!, baseUrl: "https://sandbox.glean.com/api/v1",
    datasourceSuffix: "_sandbox", indexingEnabled: true, searchQualityChecks: false,
  },
  staging: {
    apiToken: process.env.GLEAN_API_TOKEN_STG!, baseUrl: "https://staging.glean.com/api/v1",
    datasourceSuffix: "_staging", indexingEnabled: true, searchQualityChecks: true,
  },
  production: {
    apiToken: process.env.GLEAN_API_TOKEN_PROD!, baseUrl: "https://app.glean.com/api/v1",
    datasourceSuffix: "_prod", indexingEnabled: true, searchQualityChecks: false,
  },
}[env]);

Environment Files

# Per-env files: .env.development, .env.staging, .env.production
GLEAN_API_TOKEN_{DEV|STG|PROD}=<token>
GLEAN_BASE_URL=https://{sandbox|staging|app}.glean.com/api/v1
GLEAN_DATASOURCE_SUFFIX={_sandbox|_staging|_prod}
GLEAN_INSTANCE={sandbox|staging|production}

Environment Validation

function validateGleanEnv(env: string): void {
  const suffix = { development: "_DEV", staging: "_STG", production: "_PROD" }[env];
  const required = [`GLEAN_API_TOKEN${suffix}`, "GLEAN_BASE_URL", "GLEAN_INSTANCE"];
  const missing = required.filter((k) => !process.env[k]);
  if (missing.length) throw new Error(`Missing Glean env vars for ${env}: ${missing.join(", ")}`);
}

Promotion Workflow

# 1. Index test documents in sandbox
curl -X POST "$GLEAN_BASE_URL/indexing/datasources/wiki_sandbox/documents" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GLEAN_API_TOKEN_DEV" -d @test-docs.json

# 2. Validate search quality in staging
curl "$GLEAN_BASE_URL/search" -H "Authorization: Bearer $GLEAN_API_TOKEN_STG" \
  -d '{"query": "onboarding guide"}' | jq '.results[:3].title'

# 3. Compare relevance scores against baseline
node scripts/compare-search-quality.js --env staging --baseline baseline.json

# 4. Promote connector config to production
cp connectors/staging/*.json connectors/production/
curl -X POST "$GLEAN_BASE_URL/indexing/datasources/wiki_prod/crawl" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GLEAN_API_TOKEN_PROD"

Environment Matrix

Error Handling

Resources

• Glean Developer Portal
• Indexing API
• Search API

Next Steps

See glean-deploy-integration.