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About Magento modes

You can run Magento in any of the following modes:

Mode name Description
default

Enables you to deploy the Magento application on a single server without changing any settings. However, default mode is not optimized for production.

To deploy the Magento application on more than one server or to optimize it for production, change to one of the other modes.

  • Symlinks to static view files are published to the pub/static directory
  • Exceptions are not displayed to the user; instead, exceptions are written to log files.
  • Hides custom X-Magento-* HTTP request and response headers
developer

Intended for development only, this mode:

  • Symlinks to static view files are published to the pub/static directory
  • Provides verbose logging
  • Enables automatic code compilation
  • Enables enhanced debugging
  • Shows custom X-Magento-* HTTP request and response headers
  • Results in the slowest performance (because of the preceding)
production

Intended for deployment on a production system, this mode:

  • Does not show exceptions to the user (exceptions are written to logs only).
  • Serves static view files from cache only.
  • Prevents automatic code file compilation. New or updated files are not written to the file system.
  • Does not allow you to enable or disable cache types in Magento Admin. More information about enabling and disabling the cache.
maintenance

Intended to prevent access to the Magento application while it is being updated or reconfigured, this mode:

  • Redirects site visitors to a default Service Temporarily Unavailable page.
  • When the application is in maintenance mode, the var/ directory contains the .maintenance.flag file.
  • You can configure maintenance mode to allow visitor access from a specified list of IP addresses.

Magento Commerce Cloud supports only production and maintenance modes.

Default mode

As its name implies, default mode is how the Magento software operates if no other mode is specified. Default mode enables you to deploy the Magento application on a single server without changing any settings. However, default mode is not as optimized for production as is production mode.

To deploy the Magento application on more than one server or to optimize it for production, change to one of the other modes.

In default mode:

  • Errors are logged to the file reports at server, and never shown to a user
  • A symlink to a static view file is published to the pub/static directory for each requested file
  • Default mode is not optimized for a production environment, primarily because of the adverse performance impact of static files being dynamically generated rather than materialized. In other words, creating static files and caching them has a greater performance impact than generating them using the static files creation tool.

For more information, see Set the Magento mode.

Developer mode

You should run the Magento software in developer mode when you’re extending or customizing it.

In developer mode:

  • A symlink to a static view file is published to the pub/static directory for each requested file
  • Uncaught exceptions display in the browser
  • System logging in var/report is verbose
  • An exception is thrown in the error handler, rather than being logged
  • An exception is thrown when an event subscriber cannot be invoked

For more information, see Set the Magento mode.

Production mode

You should run the Magento software in production mode when it is deployed to a production server. After optimizing the server environment, such as the database and web server, you should run the static view files deployment tool to write static view files to the Magento pub/static directory.

This improves performance by providing all necessary static files at deployment instead of forcing Magento to dynamically locate and copy (materialize) static files on demand during run time.

In production mode:

  • Static view files are not materialized and URLs for them are composed on the fly. Static view files are served from the cache only.)
  • Errors are logged to the file system and are never displayed to the user.

Maintenance mode

Run Magento in maintenance mode to take your site offline while you complete maintenance, upgrade, or configuration tasks. In maintenance mode, the site redirects visitors to a default Service Temporarily Unavailable page.

You can create a custom maintenance page, manually enable and disable maintenance mode, and configure maintenance mode to allow visitors from authorized IP addresses to view the store normally. See enable and disable maintenance mode.

If you are using Magento Commerce Cloud, Magento applicationruns in maintenance mode during the deploy phase. When the deployment completes successfully, Magento returns to running in production mode. See Deployment hooks.

Next step

To set a mode, see Set the Magento mode.

To generate static view files for production mode, see Deploy static view files

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