What Is a Deployment Environment?
A deployment environment is a named destination for a release, such as development, staging, or production, that a CI/CD pipeline targets. Each environment can hold its own secrets, variables, and protection rules. Tracking deployments per environment gives a clear history of what version is running where.
Why it matters
Environments separate the blast radius of a deploy and let you scope secrets so production credentials never reach a staging job. They also anchor protection rules like required approvals and wait timers, turning the boundary between staging and production into a controlled gate.
Related concepts
- Holds environment-scoped secrets and variables
- Protection rules gate deploys to it
- Deployment history tracks the active version per environment
Related guides
What Are Environment Protection Rules?Environment protection rules gate deployments to an environment behind required approvals, wait timers, or br…
What Is an Ephemeral Environment?An ephemeral environment is a short-lived, on-demand deployment spun up for a branch or pull request and torn…
What Is a Deployment Gate?A deployment gate is a check, manual or automated, that must pass before a release is allowed to proceed to t…