---
title: Projects and environments
description: A project is one product; an environment is one running copy of it.
order: 1
---

## Projects

A project holds everything one product needs: its services, databases, domains, secret
groups, buckets and jobs, the repositories it builds from, its members and their roles, its
tokens and its audit log. Its slug, such as `rungholt`, is fixed when it is created.

People reach a project through a membership with a role. The roles that come with ops:

| role | may |
| --- | --- |
| Project admin | everything in the project: settings, members, resources |
| Developer | build, deploy and operate services; no settings, no members |
| Viewer | read everything, change nothing |
| Deployer | a machine that deploys what ops built |

A project admin can make roles of the project's own under **Settings**, **Access**.

## Environments

An environment is one running copy of the project, with its own services, databases,
domains, secret groups and jobs. A bucket belongs to the project, not to one environment.

| environment | how it gets there | what it runs |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `production` | made with the project | the default branch, deployed on every push |
| `staging`, `development` | added in **Settings**, **Environments** | a branch it follows, or only what you promote into it |
| `preview-<n>` | opened by a pull request | the pull request's branch, see [previews](deployments-and-previews.md#previews) |

Leave an environment's branch empty and it changes only when you promote into it.

Each environment has its own private network. A service reaches the other services and
databases of its own environment and nothing in another one, so a staging service is never
handed production's database.

The console's sidebar picks the environment under the project name, and every page follows
it. The CLI acts in production unless you pass `--env`:

```sh
ops resources --env staging
ops deploy web --commit 7c1d0e2 --env staging
```

## Quota

Each environment has a CPU and memory budget. Production gets 16 cores and 32 GB, every
other environment half of that. A project admin can change an environment's figures in
**Settings**, **Quota**.