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In this lesson, we will explore the concept of deployment environments in Webiny. By the end you will understand how to manage different environments for your Webiny projects.

What are Environments

In Webiny, an environment represents a specific deployment of your project. Each environment has its own set of infrastructure resources, configurations, and state files. This allows you to have multiple instances of your Webiny project, such as development, staging, and production environments.

Environment types

There are two main types of environments in Webiny:

• Long lived environments: These are persistent environments that you maintain over time, such as development, staging, and production. They are typically used for ongoing development and deployment of your Webiny project and are managed through CI/CD, or at least should be as a best practice.
• Short-lived environments: These are temporary environments that are created for specific purposes, such as testing or experimentation. They can be easily created and destroyed as needed. They are usually created on top of a code PR via the CI/CD system, or manually via the CLI by a developer working on a specific feature.

For the purposes of this course we'll mainly focus on short-lived environments, as they are easier to create and manage for learning and experimentation.

What are State Files

State files are JSON files that store the current state of your Webiny deployment. They contain information about the infrastructure resources that have been provisioned, their configurations, and other metadata related to your environment. State files are essential for managing your Webiny environments, as they allow you to track changes and ensure consistency across deployments.

How to Manage Different Environments

Managing different environments in Webiny is straightforward. You can create, deploy, and switch between environments using the Webiny CLI. Here are some common commands for managing environments:

• yarn webiny deploy --env <environment-name>: Deploys your Webiny project to the specified environment. If the environment does not exist, it will be created.
• yarn webiny info --env <environment-name>: Displays information about the specified environment, including endpoints and configurations.
• yarn webiny destroy --env <environment-name>: Destroys the specified environment and all associated resources. Use this command with caution, as it will permanently delete your deployment.

Storing State Files

By default, Webiny stores state files locally within your project directory (inside the .pulumi folder in your project - Pulumi is the open source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) platform that Webiny uses under the hood). However, for better management and collaboration, especially in team environments, it's recommended to store state files in a remote storage solution, such as an S3 bucket for which Webiny provides an out-of-the-box adapter. This allows multiple team members to access and manage the same environment without conflicts.

For the purposes of this course, we will continue to use local state files to keep things simple.

What are Deployment Modes

To create the required infrastructure resources for your project, Webiny provides ready-made infrastructure as code templates to which we refer to as deployment modes. They define the cloud resources needed to run your Webiny applications and can be customized to fit your specific requirements.

There are two deployment modes available out of the box:

• Development: This mode is optimized for local development and testing. It provisions a minimal set of resources to keep costs low while providing the necessary functionality for development purposes.
• Production: This mode is designed for production and production-like environments. It provisions a more robust set of resources to ensure high availability, scalability, security and performance of your Webiny applications.

Each mode has been optimized for its specific use case, and you can choose the appropriate one when deploying your Webiny project based on your needs. Webiny also exposes these modes via code, allowing you to inspect, modify, or extend them as needed.

One project usually has multiple environments, and each environment can be deployed using either the Development or Production mode, depending on its purpose. You are not restricted to using the same one for all environments within a project, instead, you can mix and match as needed.

For the purposes of this course, we will primarily use the Development mode to keep things simple and cost-effective.