Getting started › Core concepts
Core concepts
Five building blocks, from the organization down to each secret.
Organizations
The top-level container. It holds applications and the people who work on them. Each organization has one owner.
Applications
A project or service, such as Payments API or Web dashboard. Each application has its own environments.
Environments
A stage of an application, such as development, staging or production. Variables, secure files and permissions are set per environment.
Variables
Key–value pairs such as DATABASE_URL. Values are encrypted before they are stored, and secret values are masked in the dashboard.
Secure files
Credential files that live next to the variables: certificates, keys, keystores, provisioning profiles and configuration files.