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Production Environment (Prod)

SFBy Sitraka Forler · Lecturer, Durham Business School·Updated 13 September 2026· About this site

The live system that real users and real data depend on, as opposed to a test copy.

Code usually moves from development (your machine) to staging (a copy of production for final checks) to production. The same build should run in each, with only configuration such as the database address changing, so staging can catch what would break prod. A common beginner mistake is testing with production data or credentials; each environment needs its own secrets.

import os

env = os.environ.get("ENV", "development")
db_url = os.environ["DATABASE_URL"]  # required: a different database in each environment, KeyError if unset
print(f"Running in {env}")