Skip to main content
Environments are how a change gets from something you are editing to something real traffic reaches. Cloning, merging, publishing, and traffic splitting all act on them.

​
Draft and published

Every environment holds two versions of the agent. The draft is what you edit and what version: "draft" runs when you send a conversation. The published version is what real traffic reaches. Publishing promotes the draft to published; nothing you change before that is visible to users. New projects start with a single environment called main. Passing an alias the project does not have returns 400 invalid environment tag, so list them first if you are not sure:

​
Working with more than one

  • Clone copies an existing environment into a new one. This is how you get a second environment to build against without touching main.
  • Merge folds one environment’s changes back into another.
  • Publish promotes an environment’s draft to its published version.
  • Update traffic split routes a share of live conversations to a different environment, which is how you run one version against another on real traffic.
  • Export returns the environment as JSON, for backup or for inspecting a build outside Voiceflow.
  • Compile builds the environment without publishing it, so you can surface errors before users would.

​
Secrets

Secret values are environment-scoped, so the same secret name can hold a test value in one environment and a production value in another. They are not managed through the environment endpoints today.

​
Where to go next

After publishing, watch what happens in the transcripts, and measure it.