About environments
In software engineering, environments are used to enable engineers to develop and test code without impacting the users of their software. Typically, there are two types of environments in dbt:
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Deployment or Production (or prod) — Refers to the environment that end users interact with.
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Development (or dev) — Refers to the environment that engineers work in. This means that engineers can work iteratively when writing and testing new code in development. Once they are confident in these changes, they can deploy their code to production.
In traditional software engineering, different environments often use completely separate architecture. For example, the dev and prod versions of a website may use different servers and databases. Data warehouses can also be designed to have separate environments — the production environment refers to the relations (for example, schemas, tables, and views) that your end users query (often through a BI tool).
Configure environments to tell dbt Cloud or dbt Core how to build and execute your project in development and production:
