.. _quick-tour-big-picture-environments-intro:

So what *is* an environment? An:term:`Environment` represents a group of

configuration that's used to run your application. Symfony2 defines by default

two environments: ``dev`` (suited for when developing the application locally)

and ``prod`` (optimized for when executing the application on production).

What *is* an environment?

An:term:`Environment` represents a group of configuration that's used to run

your application. Symfony2 defines by default two environments: ``dev``

(suited for when developing the application locally) and ``prod`` (optimized

for when executing the application on production).

Typically, the environments share a large amount of configuration options. For

that reason, you put your common configuration in ``config.yml`` and override