Environments

Environments let you filter Sentry data by deployment context, such as production, staging, or development.

Environments in Sentry are string tags attached to every inbound event. They let you separate production errors from staging noise, scope alert rules to specific deployments, and track release adoption per environment.

How environments work

When an SDK sends an event, it includes an environment field. Sentry stores this value and creates an Environment record (scoped to the organization) the first time it sees a new name:

# src/sentry/models/environment.py
class Environment(Model):
    organization_id = BoundedBigIntegerField()
    projects = models.ManyToManyField("sentry.Project", through=EnvironmentProject)
    name = models.CharField(max_length=64)
    date_added = models.DateTimeField(default=timezone.now)

    class Meta:
        unique_together = (("organization_id", "name"),)

Environments are unique per organization, not per project. The same production environment record is shared across all projects in an organization.

Setting the environment in the SDK

Pass the environment option when initializing the SDK:

Python

import sentry_sdk

sentry_sdk.init(
    dsn="https://<public_key>@o<org_id>.ingest.sentry.io/<project_id>",
    environment="production",  # or "staging", "development", etc.
)

JavaScript / Node.js

Sentry.init({
  dsn: "https://<public_key>@o<org_id>.ingest.sentry.io/<project_id>",
  environment: process.env.NODE_ENV,  // e.g. "production"
});

Ruby

Sentry.init do |config|
  config.dsn = "https://<public_key>@o<org_id>.ingest.sentry.io/<project_id>"
  config.environment = ENV["RAILS_ENV"]
end

If you do not set an environment, Sentry stores events without an environment tag. Those events appear when you select All Environments in the UI but not when you filter to a specific environment.

Environment name rules

Environment names are validated against a pattern defined in sentry.constants.ENVIRONMENT_NAME_PATTERN. Names must:

• Be 64 characters or fewer
• Match the allowed character pattern (no null bytes or certain control characters)

# src/sentry/models/environment.py
@classmethod
def is_valid_name(cls, value):
    if len(value) > ENVIRONMENT_NAME_MAX_LENGTH:
        return False
    return OK_NAME_PATTERN.match(value) is not None

Common names: production, staging, development, testing, qa, canary.

Filtering by environment in the UI

The environment selector appears at the top of most Sentry pages — Issues, Performance, Releases, and Dashboards. Selecting an environment filters all data on the page to events tagged with that environment.

You can select multiple environments simultaneously using the environment selector to compare data across deployment stages.

Environments and alert rules

Alert rules can be scoped to one or more environments. An issue alert configured for production only fires when matching events carry environment=production. This prevents staging errors from paging your on-call team.

To scope an alert:

1. Open Alerts and create or edit an alert rule.
2. Under Environment, select the environment(s) this rule should apply to.

Environments and releases

When you deploy a release, you associate it with an environment using sentry-cli or the Releases API:

# Deploy a release to the production environment
sentry-cli releases deploys my-app@1.2.3 new \
  --env production \
  --started $(date +%s) \
  --finished $(date +%s)

Sentry uses this to calculate environment-specific adoption and crash-free rates on the Releases page.

Hiding environments

If an environment accumulates stale data or was created by mistake, you can hide it from the UI. Hidden environments still appear in the EnvironmentProject table but are excluded from the environment selector:

# src/sentry/models/environment.py
class EnvironmentProject(Model):
    project = FlexibleForeignKey("sentry.Project")
    environment = FlexibleForeignKey("sentry.Environment")
    is_hidden = models.BooleanField(null=True)

Go to Project Settings → Environments to hide or show individual environments for a project.