Available application modes in Magento

Before we get into code, let’s talk about the different application modes available in Magento.

We’ll first head over to the DevDocs. If you don’t know about the DevDocs yet, this is a great place to find information about a lot of things in Magento.

Search for application modes, and go to this About application modes page.

There are 4 different modes in Magento: default, developer, production & maintenance. Let’s go over each one of these.

• default is the out of the box application mode to allow you to easily run Magento. This mode is a bit of a Frankenstein mode though, in that it’s really not great for either development or production. It isn’t friendly for development because error’s aren’t displayed when they happen, and it also has poor performance on production. You’ll never really want to run this mode.

• developer mode is where it’s at! This is the mode you’ll pretty much be in all the time. Errors are displayed to the console, generated code is automatically compiled, and it is the mode that was created & designed for development. You’ll never want to run this mode on production because it isn’t performant at all, and errors displaying in the browser is a potential security risk.

• production mode is what you’ll always run on... you guessed it, production! This mode is extremely performant, but we can’t use this for development because errors aren’t displayed in the browser, caches can’t be explicitly controlled, and some configurations aren’t easily changeable. A big note about this mode is that generated code is not automatically compiled — it must be manually triggered within a deployment process. While this mode isn’t at all good for development, it runs perfectly on production and is the only mode you should run on production servers.

• maintenance mode is the last mode available, and it’s the least interesting of the bunch. This just redirects users to a “Service Temporarily Unavailable” page and basically prevents visitors from accessing your site. This is only used on production servers during specific deployment or maintenance tasks.