When you import a new process group or upgrade an existing one, missing parameters contexts and parameters will automatically be added. The new parameters will be filled with values from the environment where the process group was committed to the Registry (except sensitive parameter values). This is usually a development environment. NiFi 1.15 adds parameter context inheritance. If however you are on a lower version and have many similar process groups, you can have many copies of parameter contexts. If you add a large number of flows and need to add a large number of parameter contexts, it can be bothersome to have to manually update all the parameter contexts used by the new process groups.
In most cases when you use deployment tooling the environment configuration is kept separately from the application and applied upon deployment. This is also one of the principles of the 12 factor application (read here). For example in Azure DevOps you can use variable groups, in XL Deploy environments, a Spring Boot applications usually uses property files and K8s resources can use Kustomize templates. In this blog post I created a script which allows you to use a similar method. You can export parameters from an environment (except for sensitive parameter values). This results in a CSV file. This CSV file can be imported into a different environment. This also allows you to keep a CSV parameter file per environment which can be applied on deployment. Updating parameters in a CSV is a lot easier than doing the same manually and you can easily check if everything is correct.
You can check out my code here. Specifically look at the export_parameters and import_parameters methods.
