Using Application Environments

Overview

To reflect the different stages of your software, you can deploy your applications in different environments:

• Development: Use this when you're developing your application
• Production: For live applications
• QA: Used for quality assurance
• Staging: Mirrors the production environment but is only used for testing

In addition to these environments, you can define your own environments from the Account page, in the Setting -> Custom environment menu. Once the new environment is added, you will be able to see it in the list of supported environments when creating a new application.

Custom environments don't influence anything on the application. They will result in the relevant environment variables like RAILS_ENV and RACK_ENV (for Rack-based application) having the correct values. The usage of those custom values is up to your application.

Depending on your configuration, your application will act differently in each environment. For example, a Ruby on Rails application has a directory in config/environments that contains settings for each environment.

There is no difference between these environments when it comes to features and supported tools apart from what you define in your code.