What is an environment?

In order to understand how development environments are managed, let’s first understand what a domain means under this context.  

When you add a domain to ClusterCS, a server folder is created for it where you can store the files and then you can manage resources associated to the domain: databases, cronjobs, emails, backups, SSL, speed rules, etc. 

This initial domain setup is the “Production” environment – it contains all those resources attached to it. The server folder path for the production environment is  

/home/<user_name>/web/live/ 

Every folder and file under that folder belongs to the Production environment. 

Creating a new environment means adding a new server path associated with it and certain resources will be under its ownership. The server path would be as follows

/home/<user_name>/web/<env_name>/ 

The <user_name> is the same user as the one for the Production environment.  

The sections that are owned by the environment are: Databases, Backups, Speed, Logs and configuration options under the Manage page for Web Root, Php Version and Aliases. These sections will list only the environment databases, backups, speed rules, logging config etc.

When you delete an environment you are automatically deleting those resources as well.

If you delete a development environment its databases will be deleted as well but the databases under the other environments including Production will remain untouched. Same goes for all the other types of resources owned by the environment. The production environment is special because it actually means the entire domain and associated environments and resources. When you delete the Production environment is the same as deleting the entire domain – all environments including Production and all their resources (databases, backups, etc) will be permanently deleted.