# Development, Deployment & Environments

### Environments

We use three main environments:

* **Development** – for local work and early testing.
* **Staging** – close to production; used for QA and UAT.
* **Production** – live environment for real users.

### Local setup

1. Clone the repository.
2. Install dependencies.
3. Configure environment variables (`.env` file or secrets manager).
4. Run database migrations (if applicable).
5. Start backend and frontend services.

Detailed steps are described in `/docs/dev/local-setup.md`.

### Branching and workflow

* Main branches: `main` (production) and `develop` (staging).
* Feature branches: `feature/<short-name>`.
* Bugfix branches: `fix/<short-name>`.
* Pull requests are required for merging to `develop` and `main`.

### CI/CD pipeline

* On pull request: run tests and linters.
* On merge to `develop`: deploy automatically to staging.
* On tagged release: deploy to production (manual approval may be required).


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