Release

In software development, you can say that a release happens whenever you make your software available to users. Different release environments target different kinds of users. You can have a development environment that is mostly used to share your software with other developers and to make testing easy. There can also be a staging environment where the software is available to a broader audience, and QA testing can happen. Finally, there is a production environment where the software is made available generally to your customers. Releasing software—and API products—can be done manually or automatically. While manual releases work well for small projects, things can get more complicated if you have a large code base and a growing team working on the project. In those situations, you want to automate the release as much as possible with something called a build process.

During implementation, you focus on developing your API and ensuring you have all tests in...