Environments and what travels between them

01 What an environment is, and telling them apart An environment is one deployed copy of a site's code, with its own folder, branch and hostnames, over the same database as the site's other environments. What that shares, what it keeps apart, and the calls a template uses to tell which environment it is on.

02 Configuration and secrets per environment Which configuration can differ between a site's environments and which cannot, where secrets belong, and how staging can talk to a partner's sandbox when settings and site data are shared by every environment.

03 Code deploys, content does not A push carries files. Layouts, jobs, forms, settings and site data are records in the database, and every team learns this once, usually on a release day. What lives where, the order to release in, and what changes when work moves between sites.

04 Moving configuration between sites When work is built on one copy of a site and released on another, every record it depends on has to be moved. The admin's export and import, the safe procedure for layouts, jobs, forms, settings and site data, what to re-enter afterwards, and how to prove the move worked.

05 Refreshing a development copy A development copy refreshed from production is the best place to test, and a copy that emails real customers or charges real cards is a real incident. What to ask for, how development mode handles mail, and the checklist to run before anyone uses the copy.

Objects ReferenceGenerated from the platform, so it is always current

API ReferenceEvery REST endpoint, in cURL, PHP, Python and JavaScript

Environments and what travels between them

In this unit