Consistency in approach is key to building and maintaining 100s of applications efficiently. It dramatically reduces the cost of switching and prevents silos of knowledge in projects or teams.
The following is a typical environment setup that we use to build, deploy and maintain our applications.
As a rule, production data is never used on the local, development, and staging environments.
This will be your local environment. Typically on a local machine, but could be on a local network.
Anything goes in dev, it's yours to do what you want.
We recommend ngrok to expose public tunnels to localhost for speedy development work of APIs or with distributed teams.
Staging is a publicly accessible environment and is designed to mirror production as closely as possible.
We recommend all resources associated with staging are appended with -staging
e.g. dvelp-staging, where dvelp is the name of the git repo.
External resources, for example Sentry, should also mirror this naming convention.
The real deal. This is the holy grail and should be treated with ulitimate respect.
Live data, live traffic.
In alignment with staging, all resources should be appended with
-production e.g. dvelp-production.