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Environments

An environment represents a deployment target where versions of your products run.

Overview

Environments are where your software gets deployed. Common examples:

  • Development - Developer testing environments
  • Staging - Pre-production testing
  • UAT - User acceptance testing
  • Production - Live customer-facing systems

Environment Types

Versioner categorizes environments into types:

Type Description Examples
dev Development environments dev, local, sandbox
test Testing environments test, qa, integration
staging Pre-production environments staging, uat, preprod
production Production environments production, prod, live

Environment types serve two purposes: they control how environments are ordered and grouped in the dashboard and Deployment Requests, and they give Versioner a sense of your deployment progression — so features like promotion tracking and deployment rules can reason about which environments are "earlier" or "later" in your pipeline.

Auto-detection

Versioner automatically infers the environment type from the name you provide, using the patterns in the table above. No explicit type configuration is required.

Creating Environments

Environments are created automatically the first time you deploy to them — no pre-configuration needed. If you want to set one up ahead of time, you can create it from the dashboard.

Environment Metadata

Environments can include additional metadata:

{
  "name": "production-us-east",
  "type": "production",
  "description": "Production environment in US East",
  "metadata": {
    "region": "us-east-1",
    "cluster": "prod-cluster-1",
    "kubernetes_namespace": "production"
  }
}

Multiple Environments

You can have multiple environments of the same type:

  • production-us-east (production)
  • production-eu-west (production)
  • production-ap-south (production)

Or different naming schemes:

  • dev-team-a (dev)
  • dev-team-b (dev)
  • qa-regression (test)
  • qa-smoke (test)

Best Practices

1. Consistent Naming

Use consistent environment names across products:

✅ Good:

  • production
  • staging
  • dev

❌ Avoid:

  • prod (for one product)
  • production (for another product)
  • live (for a third product)

2. Descriptive Names

For multiple environments of the same type, use descriptive names:

✅ Good:

  • production-us-east
  • production-eu-west

❌ Avoid:

  • production-1
  • production-2

3. Environment Types

Let Versioner auto-detect types when possible:

✅ Auto-detected:

  • production → production type
  • staging → staging type
  • dev → dev type
Need help? support@versioner.io