Code moves up; content moves down

When considering non-production environments (e.g., develop, preprod) and their relationship to production environments, think of the database code separately from the content, moving through environments in opposite directions.

Best practice dictates that: Code moves up; content moves down.

Content moves downward (production → develop). The production database is the authoritative source of content, storing the most current content changes. Moving content in one direction protects the production database from overwrites and data loss.

Code, on the other hand, moves upward (develop → production). In non-production environments, development teams confirm that new code is error-free and will work as expected before the code is deployed to the production environment.