Get Started with Environment Management

Get Started with Environment Management in Harness IDP.

Welcome to Getting Started with Environment Management. This document will guide you through the environment management capabilities in Harness IDP. To understand the core features and key concepts of Environment Management in IDP, go to Overview & Key Concepts.

An environment is a collection of software services deployed using CD and executed on infrastructure provisioned through IaCM. Environment Management provides developers with a self-service way to create and manage environments, while platform engineers define the standards behind them. Together, these modules ensure that every environment is consistent, secure, and easy to use.

How environment management works for you

• Platform Engineers - You can design and maintain Environment Blueprints. A blueprint is a declarative YAML template that defines which infrastructure resources (IaCM workspaces) and services (IDP Catalog components) make up an environment, how they depend on each other, and how they are provisioned and torn down. Before creating a blueprint, platform engineers set up the underlying resources in Harness: workspace templates in IaCM, CD services, and deployment pipelines. These are then referenced in the blueprint YAML. Go to Create an Environment Blueprint to get started.

• Developers - You can create environments from blueprints your platform team has published. You select a blueprint, provide the required inputs (such as a name or service version), and the system provisions infrastructure and deploys services in the correct dependency order. Go to Environments to create your first environment.

---

Before you begin

Use the checklist below to ensure your setup is complete before getting started.

Required Harness modules

• Internal Developer Portal (IDP) - For environment blueprints and catalog

• Continuous Delivery (CD) - For service deployments

• Infrastructure as Code Management (IaCM) - For infrastructure provisioning

Required feature flags

Enable these feature flags in your Harness account:

• PIPE_DYNAMIC_PIPELINES_EXECUTION - Dynamic pipeline execution. Click here to learn more.

Infrastructure requirements

• Infrastructure with Harness Delegate installed

• Cloud provider connector configured (GCP, AWS, or Azure)

• Kubernetes connector for the target cluster

• Git connector with API access (for storing manifests and state)

For more details on how to configure connectors, visit Connectors

Secrets & secret manager

• Ensure Harness Secret Manager is enabled in your account. Environment Management uses it to store some system-generated keys. Go to Harness Secret Manager Overview to learn more.

• If Harness Secret Manager is not enabled, create a secret IDP_PO_API_KEY in the same project where environments will be created. The secret must contain a Service Account Token with the following IaCM Workspace permissions: Create, Update, and Delete. This ensures the token has exactly the permissions needed to manage IaCM Workspaces in that project.

Permissions

Click below to view the permissions you would require for each area: IDP, CD, and Platform.

IDP Permissions

Permissions required to manage entities within the IDP

Resource	Permissions
IDP Environment	View Create Edit Delete
IDP Environment Blueprint	View Create Edit Delete
IDP Catalog	View Create/Edit Delete

CD Permissions

Permissions required for managing CD resources.

Resource	Permissions
Pipeline	View Create/Edit Delete Execute
Service	View Create/Edit Delete Access
Environment	View Create/Edit Delete Access

Platform Permissions

Permissions required for managing platform-level configurations and shared resources.

Resource	Permissions	Notes
Connector	View Create/Edit Delete	If using a Harness managed code repository for Git based configuration, repository level access may also be required.
Secrets	View Create/Edit Delete
Templates	View Create/Edit Delete Access Copy
Delegates	View Create/Edit Delete	Required if delegates are used with connectors.

Additionally, permissions in Cloud (AWS, GCP etc) to create and manage resources, workloads would be needed.

Once the setup is complete, additional users can be granted the required permissions within Environment Management. For more details, refer to the RBAC section in the Environment Management Overview.

---

Tutorials

Name	Description
Tutorial 1 - Build an Ephemeral Developer Testing Environment	Set up a self-service ephemeral environment system that automatically provisions isolated test environments for PRs and deletes them after a stipulated time period.

---

Quick start path

If you are setting up environment management for the first time, follow this sequence:

1. Platform Engineers: Create an Environment Blueprint to define the infrastructure and service template for your team's environments.

2. Developers: Create an Environment using an available blueprint.

3. Manage the environment lifecycle from the Environments page, including starting, stopping, updating, and deleting environments.