Environments

What are environments?

GrowthBook ships with three built-in environments: development, staging, and production. An environment is a named context that:

Holds its own flag state (enabled/disabled, override rules).
Has its own SDK Connection with a unique clientKey.

This means a flag can be on in development and off in production at the same time — no deploys needed to move it between stages.

Admins can also add custom environments (e.g. qa, canary) from Settings → Environments.

Per-environment flag toggles

Every Feature has an environment-level toggle:

Open a Feature in GrowthBook.
Scroll to the Environments section. You will see rows for each environment.
Click the toggle next to production to enable the flag there.
The flag state in development and staging is unchanged.

Override rules (forcing a value, running an experiment, doing a percentage rollout) are also per-environment — a rule in development does not affect production.

SDK Connections — one clientKey per environment

Navigate to Settings → SDK Connections to see one connection per environment. Each connection has a unique clientKey. Use the right key in each deployment context:

// Development app
const gb = new GrowthBook({
  apiHost: 'https://cdn.growthbook.io',
  clientKey: 'sdk-dev-abc123',
});

// Production app
const gb = new GrowthBook({
  apiHost: 'https://cdn.growthbook.io',
  clientKey: 'sdk-prod-xyz789',
});

Typically you store the clientKey in an environment variable and inject it at build/runtime:

const gb = new GrowthBook({
  apiHost: 'https://cdn.growthbook.io',
  clientKey: process.env.GROWTHBOOK_CLIENT_KEY,
});

// .env.development
// GROWTHBOOK_CLIENT_KEY=sdk-dev-abc123

// .env.production
// GROWTHBOOK_CLIENT_KEY=sdk-prod-xyz789

import { GrowthBook } from '@growthbook/growthbook';

const gb = new GrowthBook({
  apiHost: 'https://cdn.growthbook.io',
  clientKey: process.env.GROWTHBOOK_CLIENT_KEY,
});

await gb.init({ timeout: 2000 });

// Same flag key works across all environments.
// The value returned depends on which environment
// the clientKey belongs to.
const isOn = gb.isOn('my-flag');

Creating an additional SDK Connection

Go to Settings → SDK Connections.
Click Add SDK Connection.
Give it a name (e.g. Production Node), select the production environment, and choose the SDK language.
Copy the generated clientKey and store it securely as an environment variable in your production deployment.