Setting up separate development and production environments does not have to be painful. This guide shows you how to build a professional deployment workflow for your Supabase project. You will learn the essential patterns that prevent the 3am "I dropped production" panic attacks while keeping your workflow fun, simple, and safe.
Supabase is the open source Postgres development platform. At its core, it is just Postgres, but with an integrated suite: Auth, Storage, Edge Functions, Realtime, and Vector search. That means you can start hacking in minutes and also scale to millions when your app takes off.
With this post, we'll explore how to setup a professional development and staging environment for our projects to prevent those late night panics.
The fastest way to ruin your night is to treat your one Supabase project as both your playground and your live app. One wrong DROP TABLE and your users are gone. The simple fix is to create at least two projects: one for breaking things (development) and one for your users (production). Larger teams often add a staging project as well, but the minimum is two.
Create them in the Supabase Dashboard and give them obvious names like myapp-dev and myapp-prod. Boring names reduce mistakes. Grab the Project Reference IDs from Settings > General and stash them in a safe place.
