About Environments

A publishing environment is a designated content delivery destination where you publish your content (entries or assets) via APIs.

Environments act as distinct channels tailored to meet your specific publishing needs. For example, you can use environments to preview content on an internal channel, such as a staging or pre-production website, which is accessible only to authorized users. Organizations have complete control over the types of environments they create and how they use them to fit their requirements and processes.

Note: Environments are global modules in Contentstack available across all branches of your stack. Any environment created in the main branch will be accessible in all other branches. For more details, refer to our global modules document.

With Contentstack you are not limited to a single environment. You can publish content across multiple environments. For instance, if you have two environments for your website: development and production and you want to preview your content in the development environment before making it live in the production environment. Here’s how you can achieve this:

1. Create two environments, development and production.
2. Publish your content to the development environment first.
3. Once the content is verified, publish it to the production environment which is publicly available.

This approach simplifies content management, allowing developers and content managers to preview and verify content before it goes live.

Note: You can only be able to view the content on your website, after publishing, if you have configured the code that fetches data from Contentstack’s server.

Besides the typical staging and production environments, you can also create environments tailored for specific channels, such as a mobile app or social media. For the latter, you would be pushing content to an external channel using Automate or Webhooks.

Note: To add multiple content deployment servers within a single publishing environment setup, use Webhooks to trigger deployments to multiple servers whenever content is published to an environment.

Additional Resource: To view your content in real time without saving or publishing it to any environment, use our Live Preview feature.