Environments

The three-environment model and how it lets you promote config safely from dev to production.

An environment is a named bucket of configuration inside a project. Variables, groups, permissions, addons, and servers all belong to exactly one environment.

Every Emrald project ships with three fixed environments:

Slug	Default name	Role
`production`	Production	The live config players hit. The source of truth.
`staging`	Staging	A pre-prod copy where you test changes before promoting them.
`development`	Development	Your sandbox. Break things freely.

You cannot add or delete environments — the set is fixed at project creation. You can only rename them and change their color.

The inheritance chain

Environments form a parent → child chain:

Production  ◀── Staging  ◀── Development
   (root)      (child)        (grandchild)

Production is the root — it has no parent and is the source of truth.
Staging inherits from Production — anything Staging doesn't override falls back to Production.
Development inherits from Staging — same idea, one level down.

This means you can experiment in Development, validate in Staging, then merge the changes back up to Production when ready. The reverse also works: if you want a hot-fix from Production reflected in Staging, you can merge it down.

What lives inside an environment

Category	Per-env?	Notes
Variables	Yes	Overrides on gamemode/addon-declared keys. See Environment variables.
Groups	Yes	In-game player roles. `Master` + `Default` always exist. See Groups.
Permissions	Yes	In-game capabilities granted to groups. See Permissions.
Addons	Yes	Installed addons enabled in this env. Each env can run a different addon set.
Servers	Yes	Dedicated server instances. A server belongs to exactly one env.

Navigating environments

From your project, click Environments in the left sidebar. You'll see the three environments laid out as cards with arrows showing the inheritance:

[ Production ]  ─── 4 changes ───►  [ Staging ]  ─── 1 change ───►  [ Development ]
   12 vars                              13 vars                          14 vars
   6 perms                              6 perms                          7 perms
   3 addons                             3 addons                         3 addons

The numbers between cards are the change counts — how many overrides differ from the parent. Click them to jump straight to the diff view. See Changes for the merge workflow.

Per-environment workspace

Click any environment card to open its detail view. You'll find five tabs at the top:

Tab	Default for	Purpose
Changes	Staging, Development	Diff vs parent — what overrides this env carries
Variables	Production	The config catalog with current overrides
Permissions	—	Group → permission grants
Groups	—	In-game player roles
Addons	—	Installed addons (browser or manual)

Production opens on Variables by default (no Changes because it has no parent). Non-prod envs open on Changes so you immediately see what diverges from upstream.

Customizing names and colors

In the Environments tab, click the colored dot on any card to pick a new color (used for badges across the panel). To rename, click the env card → use the edit button next to its name on the detail page.

Renaming changes only the display name. The internal slug (production/staging/development) is immutable — external systems and game configs depend on it.

Next steps

Create a server inside an environment
Environment variables — override gamemode defaults
Changes — promote config between environments