I am building a CI/CD pipeline for a product and am confused about a few things.
I have so far worked in a system where I used to do "code promotion" for environment progression ie each branch pointed towards a certain env and PRs between the branches but very recently I read about "artifact promotion" and I feel like it is a sensible thing to do and want to give it a try.
Now for my microservices, I am able to manage it by keeping a Docker image for each env, free from any env specific variables, and supplying env variables to my pod directly. It all works. But for my frontend, I am hosting it using S3 & CloudFront and I am using Next JS f/w and the way env variables work in Next JS is that we need to supply them at build time and they get embedded in the export/dist.
How do I do "artifact promotion" in such cases, specially when the env variables are different for each environment.
PS: I know this question is very specific to my use case. Apologies if I am asking it at a wrong place!