Dev, Staging and Live environments explained within Matomo Tag Manager
This content could not have been produced without the help of Lukas Winkler. Thank you so much.
You may have seen that when you start creating your first container within Matomo Tag Manager and/or publish it on your website, Matomo is asking you if that's the dev, staging or live container.
Let's explain what those three types are and when do you use them.
Dev: it refers to the test website that developers are using in order to run their tests.
Staging: when developing a website, developers are doing it most of the time on a local environment... so to say their own computer or a different version that the one which is finally intended to be used by the end customer. This results in some differences when running live as the software installed on the server of the end customer may be different from the local version. This is where a staging environment comes into play. A staging environment is somehow a test version on the server of the end customer.
Live: it means that this is the version running on the end customer website.
Matomo Tag Manager allows you to play with those 3 environments within the same container but to be honest, you could have created three different containers it would have end in close to the same thing.
The big advantage is really to keep your tags, triggers and variables at the same place.
You could wonder why the Matomo did not provide within one single container for those 3 environments? Well simply because it would have make the JavaScript longer to load and that others could have seen the content of the 3 environments.