Instances & environments

Every Atlas application has exactly two instances: Development and Production. An instance is a complete, isolated copy of the platform — its own users, sessions, organizations, connections, settings, signing keys and API keys.

Why two instances

You need a safe place to build and test without touching real users, and a hardened place to serve them. Atlas gives you both automatically, so you never test against production data or ship a half-configured provider to customers.

Development instance

• Keys prefixed pk_test_ / sk_test_.

• Shared OAuth credentials for popular providers, so you can try Google or GitHub sign-in immediately without registering your own OAuth apps.

• Relaxed rate limits and email/SMS sending suited to testing.

• Ideal for local development, CI and staging.

Production instance

• Keys prefixed pk_live_ / sk_live_.

• Your own OAuth credentials for every social provider.

• Production-grade rate limits and attack protection.

• Optional custom domain so sign-in happens on accounts.yourapp.com.

• Your finalized branding and email templates.

Keeping settings in sync

Instance settings do not automatically copy from Development to Production. When you go live, reproduce in Production:

• The sign-in methods you enabled.

• Each social/enterprise connection, using your own credentials.

• Branding, email/SMS templates and custom domain.

• Webhook endpoints (pointing at your production backend).

• Security policy (session lifetimes, MFA requirements, attack protection).

Rule of thumb: if a value is a secret or a URL, it almost always differs between Development and Production. Re-enter it deliberately rather than assuming it carried over.

Next

Meet the object at the center of it all → Users & profiles.