Is using different environments as simple as moving your meltano config settings under "dev" or "prod" and then setting some env var to "DEV" and "PROD" to point your runtime environment to the right config? Like if I want to test out a tap in dev I can just add it to my dev config and test it there before I add/change it in my production config?

yes, as long as you are using the SQLite state storage backend. If you decide that you are going to use something like PostgreSQL for the state backend, then separate configs in the meltano.yml no longer really make sense because

MELTANO_DATABASE_URI

is an environment variable only configuration item and decades of experience have taught me never to mix environment variable configuration with multiple environment file configuration (because… I know, I know I will forget to set the correct environment variable and push dev state into production or vice versa). (Yes you could get around this by aliasing

meltano

in your shell to set the variable based on the environment switch, but frankly not a risk I am willing to take.)

The risk being that you keep the same MELTANO_DATABASE_URI env var and incorrectly update the state of your pipelines?

yes, exactly that

Yeah that's fair. I'm using az blob store for my state backend and the connection string remains constant across each blob container so that env var would remain constant across both my stg and prod environments. I think I should be okay since I can manually set the state backend uri in my prod/stg configs seperately to point at their own respective blob containers.

I set pretty much everything through environment variables, but that’s my general approach on every project. There’s a guarantee that on a Linux host environment variables will work, and you can securely inject them into a container in a build environment so they are my default go to.

Gotcha, well thx for the input