what is a development enviroment and how do I create one?

[Lisa McOrist]

Hi, I'm trying to work out how to style confluence to match our branding, and I've installed Zen Foundation to give more flexibility. In the zen documentation it gets to a certain point where you are asked to enable a feature that comes up with the message "blah, blah... and so should be enabled only in a development environment". Given that at this stage I'm really just trying to find out how one would go about styling a site and hoping I can play around with some options before I even consider apyling it to the whole confluence site a "development enviroment" seems like a great idea. However I can't seem to find any documentation about what a "development enviroment" is or how to set one up. I would really appricate any help.

[Taiwo Akindele · Accepted solution]

In addition to that if you choose to set up a development enviroment for Confluence. You would not require an additional commercial license since this is a non-production instance.

You can generate a free developer license tied to your production commercial license from my.atlassian.com. You can learn more about this in https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/purchase-licensing#licensing-9

[Darryl Duke]

Hi Lisa,

A development environment is simply an installation of Confluence separate from your production instance (which means the Confluence installation that your organization's users are actively using). Another way of saying development environment is "test server." It's just a safe place to play around without worrying about affecting other users.

If you're running Confluence on your local machine (or you're the only one using it at this point), then you can consider your environment safe for enabling the brand designer.

Also, you might want to check out the decision chart on this page: http://www.brikit.com/display/brikit/Products to see if you might want to evaluate Theme Press instead (our new product that will eventually replace Zen Foundation).

Cheers,
Darryl