In Console, there are three types of environments: Test, Dev, and Live. You're always in a specific environment, which you can choose from an environment dropdown.

The environments separate your test data and work-in-progress content and configuration from your live marketplace user data, content, and configuration. Each environment has its unique set of data (users, listings, transactions, and reviews) and configuration (content pages, custom fields, etc).

When you create a new account in Sharetribe, you first arrive in your Test environment. The Test environment allows you to build and preview your marketplace without coding and create test user accounts, listings, and transactions to see how things work.

The Test environment continues to be important after you've launched your marketplace. It ensures that whenever you want to make changes to the content and configuration of your marketplace, you can preview your changes with test users and listings while ensuring that your actual users won't see your work-in-progress changes.

Whenever you want to make changes to the content and configuration of your no-code marketplace, you should always make them first in your Test environment. Once you've previewed them and are happy with how they work, you can copy them to your Live environment.

When you're ready to launch your marketplace to real users, start processing real transactions, and possible use a custom domain, you need a Live environment for your real user data. You can enable a Live environment by clicking the environment picker in the top left corner of your Console.

In most cases, you should not make changes directly to the configuration of your Live marketplace. Instead, you should make them first in your Test environment, preview them, and once you're happy with them, copy them to your Live environment using the "Copy changes..." button in the top right of your Console.

If you start customizing your marketplace with code, you should enable a Dev environment. Dev stands for development. This ensures that the work-in-progress changes you're doing with custom development don't interfere with your Test or Live environments, so you can continue maintaining your marketplace without coding while a development project is in progress. You can use the "Copy changes to..." functionality to copy your latest content and configuration to your Dev environment to ensure that the development happens against the latest version of your marketplace.

If you're doing lots of complex custom code, you might need additional dev environments for your organization for things like Quality Assurance (QA) or automated testing. We can include additional Dev environments to your paid subscription at a price of $49 per month per environment. If you need an additional Dev environment, please contact us via the chat in your Console or in the messenger at the bottom right of this page.