Understanding Development, Staging, and Production Environments

The ultimate goal for a website update is to move the updated application code from development to production as seamlessly as possible. This movement of application code is referred to as deployment. Movement, in this context, involves copying application code and configuration files from one environment to another.

Before we get into the details of migrating an application to PHP 8, let’s first have a look at what these environments are. Gaining an understanding of what form the different environments might take is critical to our role as a developer. With this understanding, we are in a better position to deploy our code to production with a minimal amount of errors.

Defining an environment

We use the word environment to describe a combination of software stacks that include the operating system, web server, database server, and PHP installation. In the past, the environment equated to a server. In this modern age, however, the term server is deceptive in that it implies a physical computer in a metal box sitting on a rack in some unseen server room. Today, this is more likely not going to be the case, given the abundance of cloud service providers and highly ...