About application 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.
|
developer | Intended for development only, this mode:
|
production | Intended for deployment on a production system, this mode:
|
maintenance | Intended to prevent access to a site while it is being updated or reconfigured, this mode:
|
Adobe Commerce on cloud infrastructure supports only the production and maintenance modes.
Default mode
As its name implies, default mode is how Magento 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
- Static view files are cached
- 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
Run Magento in developer mode when you are extending or customizing it.
In developer mode:
- Static view files are not cached; they are written to the Magento
pub/static
directory every time they’re called - 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
Run Magento 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.
-
You can enable and disable cache types only using the command line.
You cannot enable or disable cache types using the Admin
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 Adobe Commerce on cloud infrastructure, the Magento application runs in maintenance mode during the deploy phase. When the deployment completes successfully, Magento returns to running in production mode. See Deployment hooks.
Related topics
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To set a mode, see Set the Magento mode.
-
To generate static view files for production mode, see Deploy static view files