I can imagine this blog post will leave developers with the feeling, that they read something very obvious. That’s reasonable. From a specific point of view at least. But my work life with (in the meantime) many different “Symfony developers” showed me, that I am by far not alone.

I thought I understood Symfony Environments. I used to think the environments represent the different stages an application gets deployed to, or is used in. For example test, acceptance, staging, production, preview, but also unit tests. It always seemed a little bit flawed to me. Why does the Symfony standard edition only provides frontcoller for dev (app_dev.php) and prod (app.php), but not for test by default? Why should I use the test-environment for both the test-server and the unit tests [2]? Why do I need to take care to setup the webservers correctly only to point to the right front-controller (environment)? And others. Small details, that felt like either I, or the entire community missed something.

And then it hit me. I got it in the exact moment I told somebody else “Even prod should be runnable on your local machine without incidents”.

You indeed should run every stage with the prod-environment. The environments are not about the stage an application is in, but about the behaviour it should show. Deploying an application on the server used for acceptance tests means, that I want to show, how it will look like in production. Of course it should behave like production. Exactly. In every single detail.

On the other hand during development, testing, or for example – as mentioned in the Symfony documentation – benchmarking you want different behaviours. You want something different from production, that helps you to achieve your goal. Benchmarking? You need a profiler. Development? You want some more insight into the applications architectural details. Testing? You need something you can verify your assertions against.

Still, there are differences between the stages. I’ll just summarize some points I imagine colleagues will ask me.

Whats about … Logging?

Questions: Do you really need specific log levels during acceptance, when you don’t need them in production? Do you actually look at them? Do you really need debug logs on the test server? Why and what do you debug there, what you cannot debug on your development platform? But that aside. It’s just that maybe different log levels on some servers are not worth the hassle to handle different environments. Or even doesn’t any benefit at all. I’ve seen teams, that never look at the logs on the test server, but frequently changed the config on production.

If you still need them, consider introducing a log_level parameter in parameters.yml. As a side effect you can change the log-level of deployed applications without re-deployment and even on production, when and if needed. Maybe introduce multiple parameters for different loggers. I see this frequently with java applications and property-files. I guess it’s not too bad.

Whats about … APIs?

Integrating external APIs into an application is just integrating another external system. You thought the database is part of the application? It isn’t. It is something the application uses [1]. The connection settings for the database are already in the default parameters.yml, so the settings for every other external should be there. As a side effect you prevent yourself from accidentally accessing production APIs from your development platform just because you hardcoded the URLs into the config_*.yml and did something wrong with the environment.

Whats about … Mails?

Of course you don’t want to send mails from your test server to your costumers. It happened to me once and theoretically I ordered a “test”-vaccum-cleaner. But to be fair, the bug I reported was about my email address, thus I guess they just needed an example email address to work with. I’ll dedicate a separate post for this.

At the end: Instead of saying “the difference between the stages should be minimal”, you should say “There is no difference at all”. You only need one environment.

[1] You can say, that the database is something the applications “owns” and “controls” in a certain way, but it is not within the application and there may be situations, were others (DBA?) access them. It’s not “yours”, it’s just something somebody allowed you to use.

[2] Even the documentation mentions

The test environment is used when writing functional tests and is not accessible in the browser directly via a front controller. In other words, unlike the other environments, there is no app_test.php front controller file.

Yeah, I did it wrong all the time.