Environment Variables: Dev, Staging, and Production

The same request usually needs to run against more than one place — your local machine while you're building, staging before a release, production once it's live. Rewriting the URL and tokens by hand every time you switch is exactly what Environments exist to remove.

What an environment is

An environment is a named set of variables — a base URL, an API key, whatever else a request references — that you can swap in and out without touching the request itself. Write a request once against {{baseUrl}}/users, and switching environments changes what {{baseUrl}} actually resolves to.

AlleForge supports this at two levels:

• Environment variables — the set you swap between (dev, staging, production, or however you've split things up).
• Collection-level variables — values scoped to one collection, useful for things that don't change per environment but still shouldn't be hardcoded into every request.

A typical switch

1. Build a request using a variable instead of a literal value — {{baseUrl}} instead of https://api-staging.example.com.
2. Define that variable once in each environment you use (dev, staging, prod), pointing at the right host each time.
3. Switch the active environment. Every request using {{baseUrl}} now resolves against the new one — nothing about the request itself changes.

Where this matters most

Two places this shows up constantly:

• Authentication — a bearer token or API key is almost always environment-specific. Store it as an environment variable once, and every request that inherits auth from the collection picks it up automatically. See Authentication for how inherited auth works.
• Testing localhost or private APIs — if you're pointing {{baseUrl}} at http://localhost:3000 instead of a public host, you'll also need AlleForge Agent running, since a browser tab can't reach localhost or an internal network on its own.

What this isn't

Environments swap values — they don't isolate collections from each other or add access control. Who can see or edit an environment follows the same workspace roles as the collection it belongs to.