Environments make it easier for your development team to manage and maintain content structure once your content has been published. You can think of environments like code branches: great for testing, development and pre-production environments.
By default, every project has one environment, called primary environment, which is meant to be used for the regular editorial workflow. Additionally, multiple sandbox environments can be created by developers to safely test/experiment new changes in the content.
Sandbox environments start out as exact copies of one of the existing environments (ie. the primary one). The process of creating a new sandbox starting off from an existing environment is called fork.
Each environment is identified by a name (ie. master) and stores the following information:
When making changes to any of the aforementioned entities in any environment, including the primary environment, the data in all other environments isn’t affected and stays the same.
ID of environment. Can only contain lowercase letters, numbers and dashes
"main"
Must be exactly "environment".
Status of the environment
"ready"
The environment is being forked
The environment is ready
The environment is being destroyed
The completion percentage of the fork operation (only present if the status is creating)
95
Is this environment the in read-only mode because of a fast-fork?
Date of creation
Last data change
Is this environment the primary for the project?
ID of the environment that's been forked to generate this one
"main"