Rails ships with a default configuration for the three most common environments that all applications need: test, development, and production. That’s a great start, and for smaller apps, probably enough too. But for Basecamp, we have another three: Beta: For testing feature branches on real production data. We often run feature branches on one of our five beta servers for weeks at the time to eval
![Beyond the default Rails environments](https://cdn-ak-scissors.b.st-hatena.com/image/square/f8996d0efffe180a2e7a56f5826dacafb0817bbd/height=288;version=1;width=512/https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2F37assets%2Fsvn%2F1295-in-app-switcher.png)