Create environment

Platform.sh supports the deployment of isolated development environments from your branches, complete with exact copies of all of your data. This is useful for testing changes in isolation before merging them.

Create branch, make changes, push to Platform.sh

Create and checkout a branch for your new feature.
```
platform branch dev
```
This command will create a new branch dev from master, as well as a local dev branch for you to work on. dev will be a clone of master, including an exact-copy of all of its data and files.

Make changes to your code, commit them, and push to the Platform.sh remote.
```
git add .
git commit -m "Commit message."
git push platform dev
```
Note:
If you create a new branch with Git (i.e. git checkout -b new-feature), when you push its commits to Platform.sh that branch will not automatically build. new-feature is an inactive environment, because Platform.sh does not assume that every branch should be associated with an active environment, since your plan will limit the number of active environments you are allowed.

If you want to activate the new-feature environment after it has been pushed, you can do so with the command
```
platform environment:activate new-feature
```
Verify

After Platform.sh has built and deployed the environment, verify that it has been activated by visiting its new url:
```
platform url
```
The command will provide a list of the generated routes for the application according to how the routes were configured. The structure will be:
```
Enter a number to open a URL
  [0] https://<branch name>-<hash of branch name>-<project ID>.<region>.platformsh.site/
  [1] https://www.<branch name>-<hash of branch name>-<project ID>.<region>.platformsh.site/
```
The above URLs represent the upstream (0) and redirect (1) routes for the most common routes.yaml configuration.