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Nexa Platform Docs

Environments

Nexa runs as three environments — dev, test, and prod — so you can build and validate data flows, agents, and automations before they reach production. Each environment is a separate install of the platform that targets its own branch of your artifact repository and its own set of catalogs/schemas in Snowflake or Databricks.

Use this page to understand which environment you are in, what that determines, and how changes move forward. You rarely change environment settings yourself: the active environment is fixed per install by your platform team.

The three environments

Section titled “The three environments”

Each environment maps to a Git branch (in your artifact repository) that holds the generated artifacts for that stage:

Environment Label Artifact branch
dev DEV develop
test TEST release
prod PROD main

The active environment is resolved from the deployment’s configuration (the APP_ENVIRONMENT setting, falling back to AGENT_ENVIRONMENT), and the corresponding artifact branch from ARTIFACT_BRANCH. The web UI reads this from /api/config/env-info and shows the label so you always know where you are.

What the environment determines

Section titled “What the environment determines”
  • Artifact branch — generated SQL, PySpark, and pipeline code is committed to the environment’s branch (develop / release / main) in the GitHub-connected repository.
  • Target catalogs and schemas — each environment writes its Raw, Curated, and Consumption layers into its own data-platform namespaces, so dev data never mixes with prod.
  • Editability — configuration authoring (adding connections, domains, Slack config, document templates) happens in dev. In test and prod these actions are hidden and changes arrive by promotion instead of manual re-entry.

Promotion between environments

Section titled “Promotion between environments”

Work moves forward one step at a time: dev → test → prod. Promotion never edits the target environment in place — it opens a pull request that copies the relevant artifacts from the current environment’s branch to the next environment’s branch. You review and merge that PR in GitHub when ready.

Promotion is available for:

Section titled “Related settings”
  • GitHub Integration — the repository and branch artifacts are committed to.
  • System Settings — retention, metadata mount, and LLM context, configured per environment.