.Net Hosting Environment

The .Net hosting environment variable (DOTNET_ENVIRONMENT or ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT) tells the application the current environment name such as development, staging or production. The value is critical since the application will load the appropriate configuration value specific to that environment.

When the environment variable is missing, .NET default the value to production. There are a few different reasons from Microsoft:

• Since developers should never have direct access to production, it is the safest option.
• Production excludes things like detailed error messages and other stuff that should never be turned on in a production environment. You must opt-in to lower security.

While this explaination are valid for contain use cases, the "security benefits" are rather small. The risk of updating production data by accident is very high for small to medium size enterprises where developers do have more rights than they are supposed to.

Albatross.Config has a custom implementation for IHostEnvironment interface so that it would return "Unknown" when hosting environmental variable is not set. The same behavior goes to the EnvironmentSetting class that serves a similar purpose.