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Open an environment

Every environment has its own address. Development might be at

acme-dev.parsware.com

and production at

acme.parsware.com

Opening that address opens that environment. There is no environment picker inside the app, because there is nothing to pick — the address already said which one you are in.

Why it works this way​

An environment used to be a setting you chose after signing in, and that had a particular kind of cost. Two browser tabs on the same URL could be pointing at different environments. A bookmark did not remember which one. A link to "this record" meant something different for whoever you sent it to. And the only thing telling a live tenant apart from a sandbox was a dropdown you had to remember to read.

An address fixes all of those at once. You can bookmark it, send it, and tell two tabs apart at a glance.

Finding the address​

The Admin Control Center's home page shows the open environment's address, with a button to open it and a button to copy it. The full list is on Environments, where each row's address is a link.

Changing it​

An address is generated when the environment is created — "Sales Dept" becomes sales-dept — and you can change it on the environment's row.

Changing it breaks every link to the old one. Bookmarks, integrations, and anything printed or sent stop working, and nothing redirects, because the old address immediately becomes available for somebody else to take. Change it early or not at all.

Addresses are unique across the whole platform, not just your tenant, because a hostname is global. If dev is taken you will be asked for another; acme-dev is the usual shape.

Some names are reserved for the platform itself — www, api, admin, docs and similar.

"This address does not name an environment"​

You have reached the Shell at an address no environment answers on. Nothing is wrong with your account; the address is simply not one of ours. Open the right address from the Admin Control Center's home page.

Working locally​

While developing, the same rule applies: the Shell needs a subdomain.

http://acme-dev.localhost:5180

not http://localhost:5180, which names no environment and will say so. Chrome, Edge and Firefox resolve *.localhost to your own machine with no setup at all — nothing to install and no hosts file to edit. Safari does not, and needs lvh.me (acme-dev.lvh.me:5180) or a hosts entry instead.

The address to use is the one shown for your environment in the Admin Control Center.