Question

Typically, I am used to a: local, local-test, dev(dev.site.com), and prod(site.com).

With rails local being ‘development’ it messes up all of my lingo of what’s what. What do you guys typically call each environment in rails and what are each one’s responsibilities?

I am aware that I can change development to be local and will probably do that in the near future, as the rails default.

Answer 1

Default environments include development, test, and production.

• Development: Typically used on your local machine, where you do all of your coding. Contains more verbose error messages than production, doesn’t compress or precompile assets, and doesn’t cache classes or controllers (so you can reload your browser and see changes immediately)
• Test: A special environment for running tests in without affecting your development database (db is wiped clean between tests).
• Production: Final destination. Used for your production/deployment server, where you want maximum performance and minimum verbosity. Debug information is hidden from the user, assets are compressed and precompiled, and caching is enabled — because code isn’t expected to change much between executions.

As Dave mentioned, some people add a staging environment as a sort of middle ground between development and production, to test their app on their remote server. It’s often just a matter of copying config/environments/production.rb to config/environments/staging.rb and adding an entry to database.yml so your staging changes don’t affect the production database.