Environments

Environments allow you to maintain separate sets of secrets for different stages of your development workflow.

Default Environment

When you create a project, a development environment is created by default. You can add additional environments like staging and production as needed.

Switching Environments

Use the environment tabs at the top of the secrets page to switch between environments.

Each environment maintains its own:

• Secret values
• Version history
• Access logs

Environment Isolation

Secrets are completely isolated between environments:

# development
DATABASE_URL=postgres://localhost/mydb_dev

# staging
DATABASE_URL=postgres://staging-server/mydb_staging

# production
DATABASE_URL=postgres://prod-server/mydb_prod

This ensures you never accidentally use production credentials in development.

Environment Permissions

Control who can access each environment with granular permissions.

Permission Levels

Managing Permissions

1. Navigate to an environment in your project
2. Click the ⋮ menu next to the environment tabs
3. Select Manage Access
4. Add team members and assign their permission level

Default Permissions

Set default permissions for new team members in Project Settings → Default Permissions. When a new member joins the team, they'll automatically receive these permissions for each environment.

Best Practices

1. Never copy production secrets to development - Use separate credentials for each environment
2. Use similar key names - Keep the same keys across environments for consistency
3. Document differences - Use descriptions to note environment-specific requirements
4. Restrict production access - Use environment permissions to limit who can view production secrets
5. Use read-only for CI/CD - Service tokens for CI/CD only need read access