Environments

An environment is a label with a rule that says on which website, or on which version of a website, an experiment is allowed to run. Typical uses:

• A live site and a staging site, so a test only runs where you want it
• One site per country or language, for example us, uk and ca
• One website that is served on several subdomains

You define environments once in your project and then assign them to your experiments. Pages, audiences and goals stay shared.

Do you need environments?Copy Anchor Link

If your project is a single website, you can ignore environments. An experiment without an environment can run everywhere the snippet is installed.

Use environments if you run the snippet on more than one site, or if you want to keep a test away from a staging site (or the other way around).

Create an environmentCopy Anchor Link

1. Open your project and go to Settings → Environments.
2. Click Create and fill in the form:
   • Color: a label color that helps you to recognize the environment.
   • Name: a clear, descriptive name such as Staging. Unique in the project.
   • API Name: only for advanced users. Letters, numbers, dashes and underscores, filled in from the name and unique in the project. It is used in the file name of the sub-snippet.
   • Rules: JavaScript that returns true on the websites where the environment applies. The Code Helper next to it offers ready-made expressions (subdomain, domain, tld) that you can copy.
   • Optional: Description, Use as project default (new experiments get this environment automatically; only one environment per project can be the default, and there is none until you enable it) and Create a sub-snippet.
3. Save.

A developer can help you with the rule. How to write rules, with examples, is explained in the developer guide.

Assign environments to an experimentCopy Anchor Link

1. Open the experiment.
2. In the card Environments ("Restrict to environments") in the right column, click Edit.
3. Select one or more environments and click Save.

Environments are not part of the form for creating an experiment, you set them on the experiment's page. The card then shows the assigned environments. Without any, it shows No restrictions set.

Good to know:

• Environments are checked after the page matched and before audiences.
• If you set an environment as Use as project default, new experiments get it automatically.
• Cloning an experiment copies its environments.
• Changing the environments of a live experiment is published automatically.

If an experiment should run on several domains, set up its pages so that they do not depend on one domain, see Match types.

Find the environments of your experimentsCopy Anchor Link

In the experiment list, the column Environments shows the assigned environments with their color.

Edit or delete an environmentCopy Anchor Link

You can edit an environment at any time, and ABlyft publishes the change if experiments use it. An environment that is used by experiments cannot be deleted. Open the environment and check Used in experiments, remove it from these experiments, then delete it. Creating, editing and deleting requires the role member, admin or owner.

Next stepsCopy Anchor Link