Environments

Novu uses environments to separate your workflows and its data. This lets you safely test changes, like a new workflow, in one environment before moving it to a live production environment.

Types of environments

When you create a Novu account, you are provided with a development and production environment by default. On certain plans, you can also create custom environments to match your team’s workflow.

• Development environment: Use the development environment to build and test new workflows, layouts, translations, and experiment with different configurations before publishing to other environments.
• Production environment: The production environment is used to send notifications to your subscribers. To ensure stability and prevent unintended changes, this environment is view-only for workflows, layouts, and translations. Changes are not made here directly, they are made from other environment and then published to this production environment.
• Custom environment: Custom environments are only available on Team and Enterprise plans. You can use them to reflect your release process, for example, staging or QA.

Create a custom environment

To create a custom environment:

1. Log in to the Novu dashboard.
2. Go to the Environments page in the Novu dashboard.
3. Click Create environment. A menu appears.
4. Enter your preferred environment name in the Name field.
5. Assign unique colors to easily distinguish between environments.
6. Click Create environment. The new environment is created and is available in the environments list.

What's unique to each environment?

Each environment in Novu has it's own isolated resources, while the development environment has assets that can be published to other environments.

Each environment maintains some isolated set of resources, while you can share or promote other assets through publishing.

Environment-specific resources

These resources are completely separate and unique to each environment. Data in one environment has no connection to data in another. They are:

• Activity feed
• API keys (application identifier and secret key)
• Integrations (Provider credentials)
• Subscribers
• Topics
• Webhooks

Publishable assets

These assets are managed centrally in the development environment and then published to other environments.

• Layouts
• Translations
• Workflows

Environment credentials

Each environment has two unique identifiers:

• Application Identifier

  • Public ID for client-side apps
  • Used with <Inbox />
  • Different for each environment
  • Safe to expose in frontend code

• API Secret Key

  • Used for backend API authentication
  • Keep this secure and never expose publicly
  • Different for each environment

Publish changes to other environments

Novu provides a publish mechanism that allows you to promote changes from your development environment to production or other custom environments. This process ensures that all changes are deliberate, reviewed, and deployed in a controlled manner.

The publishing process bundles all modifications made to workflows, layouts, and translations since the last publish event.

You can promote changes to other environments by following these steps:

1. Ensure you are in the Development environment. All changes must originate from here.
2. Click Publish changes. A list of available environments appears.
3. Select the environment that you want to publish to.
4. Select the checkboxes next to the workflows that you want to publish. A menu appears, showing all the available workflows.
5. Click the publish button to publish the selected workflows to the selected environment.

Frequently asked questions

Frequently asked questions related to managing environments:

Publishing requires the **Admin** or **Owner** role. Members with the **Author** or **Viewer** role can create and edit workflows in Development, but they cannot publish those changes to Production or other environments.

Ask your organization owner or an admin to update your role from the [Team settings](https://dashboard.novu.co/settings/team) page. See [Roles and permissions](/platform/account/roles-and-permissions) for the full permissions matrix.