Environment

What does “Environment” refer to in Web Development?

Environments allow a developer to work on a website without changing the Live version.

By running a copy of your website in a separate environment, a developer can work freely.

Different Types of Environments

The three most common environments are, “Development”, “Staging”, and “Production”. While not official terms, as you give an environment any name, they are common practice.

Development Environments

Dev environments are where developers can safely throw stuff around. Because a live website has visitors, it’s too risky to make changes on there. And in some cases, you’ll want to bundle a bunch of changes together. And Deploy or Ship that code to Production when the updates are ready.

Dev environments can act differently; minification and other forms of “post-processing” are left out in order to improve the development workflow.

When a developer is ready to present their changes to a website owner, this is often done in a Staging Environment.

Production Environments

Often referred to as the “live” site. Where the website is accessible to its users. Making changes to a production environment.

There are no set rules

Whether you want 1 or 100 environments is totally up to your needs. As developers we can create and destroy environments very quickly.