How do you choose your mix environment for your QA/staging deployments?

[christhekeele]

@benwilson512

The thing to distinguish is between “build environments” and “deployment environments”. As you say for development and testing, these are done often on people’s computers and have dedicated build environments to handle the different dependencies and tasks necessary for testing and dev.

I like to use MIX_ENV for build concerns (debug logs in dev, mocks in test, optimizations in prod) and MIX_TARGET for deployment concerns, to differentiate between things like demo, QA, staging, prod, etc. Those normally get deployed as prod builds, but can be deployed as dev builds if extra visibility is needed.