What on earth is a development environment and why do I need it? It is fairly widely accepted that during the process of building your website, you should not make it available for people to use over the Internet. Making your site live, while you are still making changes and breaking and fixing things, means that it is possible for people to find your site, attempt to use it, and form an exceedingly bad opinion of your web development skills. You might, in the worst case, find that you have even inadvertently allowed malicious users to gain access to sensitive information due to improperly implemented security settings, among other things.