--- title: "Unified Environment Creator, New Variable Generator, Template Health Indicators" date: 2024-01-19 number: 0169 url: https://railway.com/changelog/2024-01-19-environment-creator-pb --- # Unified Environment Creator, New Variable Generator, Template Health Indicators Hello, weary traveler, welcome to another changelog! Why don’t you relax by the campfire and we’ll regale you with tales of creating environments, generating unique variables, checking the health of your templates, and much more? Sound like fun? Stay a while! ## Unified Environment Creator New feature alert! If you have the `Updated Environments` [feature flag](https://railway.app/account/feature-flags) set, there’s a new experience for you today. We have unified the flow around the “fork” system and the “new” system that was just arguably really confusing. You can now create a new environment that copies all (or none!) of the variables and config from an existing environment. [Image: The new way to create an environment gives you more power and control] Want to create a full copy of your environment to be used as a staging or development workspace? Easy. Copy everything (services, variables, and config) over. Want to test out ideas in isolation and selectively merge the changes back into production? You can do that too! Find the new `New Environment` modal in the environment menu in the canvas. (Now try saying that five times fast…) Onward! ## New Variable Generator We’ve added a delightful new little feature to variables, but once again you’ll need to enable the `Updated Environments` [feature flag](https://railway.app/account/feature-flags) to access it (for now). [Image: The new Variable Generator is at your service!] The Variable Generator is a nifty little tool that you can use to templatize new variables for your services. Did you catch that you can do this on deploy? That’s cool, right? Variables created from a template that generate values on deploy now keep the generator associated with the variable. So when the environment is forked using the above flow, we will run the generator to create a new variable value. This allows you to easily have different secret values (like database passwords) per environment. It also requires no intervention from you if you are deploying databases or templates. It will just work.™ Any templates that use [template variable functions](https://docs.railway.app/guides/create#template-variable-functions) will automatically work with variable generators. Variables with a generator will have a little *function *icon to the left of the value. You can use the 3-dot menu to open up the generator menu. Enjoy! ## Template Health Indicators Has this ever happened to you? You go to the [Template Marketplace](https://railway.app/templates) and the template you deploy doesn’t work out of the box. What do you do? Drive back to the store and try a new one? After getting a bunch of feedback about template quality, engineers Faraz and Melissa spent some time and effort creating a new way to indicate the level of success of recent deployments for a given template. If anything goes wrong with your template? The template maintainer will now be aware of failure! Whatever you do *please* don’t call it CI. [Image: Popular templates now feature a health indicator based on recent activity] [Image: Check your templates to see if they’re succeeding in deploys!] ## Migration Reminder As we [keep reminding you](https://railway.app/changelog/2024-01-05-feedback-season#plugin-migration-reminder), [the Future of Databases is Services](https://blog.railway.app/p/launch-01-next-gen-databases). **You have nearly week left to do so!** If you need help from the Railway team, please raise a support request, we are working with customers big and small to help them confidently move their data to the next generation of services. Everyone on the platform received an email on final timeline — we stand at the ready to help your transition. [You can follow the in-product flow or use the migration guide.](https://docs.railway.app/guides/database-migration-guide) ## 💖 Bonus 💖 Set a service name with an emoji as the first character and we will use that emoji as the service icon. Try it out! ## Improvements and Fixes - We fixed an issue where services with emojis could not be used in reference variables - Setting `RAILWAY_DEPLOYMENT_DRAINING_SECONDS=60` will apply a `SIGTERM`, wait 60 seconds, and then a `SIGKILL`. Works for up to 3 hours.