Local Development

AuraImage provides separate dev slugs so that test uploads during local development never appear in your production analytics, billing counters, or CDN cache. Both local and production environments connect to the same auraimage.ai API.

How It Works

Every project has two slugs that map to isolated storage namespaces:

The <AuraImage /> component switches slugs automatically based on NODE_ENV:

const slug =
  process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production'
    ? process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_AURA_SLUG
    : process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_AURA_DEV_SLUG;

Environment Variables

NEXT_PUBLIC_AURA_PUBLIC_KEY=pk_live_...
AURA_SECRET_KEY=sk_live_...

# Production namespace
NEXT_PUBLIC_AURA_SLUG=narek

# Development namespace
NEXT_PUBLIC_AURA_DEV_SLUG=dev-narek

The aura init command writes these automatically. If you need to rotate keys, run aura init --rotate.

Dev Storage Policies

• Dev storage is temporary: all images are wiped every 30 days.
• Dev storage is separate from production: no dev image ever appears in production analytics.
• Dev storage has the same CDN, transformations, and format support as production. Testing is accurate.
• Your production billing is not affected by dev uploads.

Clearing Dev Storage

You can purge your dev namespace at any time from the dashboard (Settings → Dev Storage → Clear), or via CLI:

aura dev purge

CI/CD

In your CI/CD pipeline, set NODE_ENV=production and provide the production Secret Key. The CLI and SDK will automatically use the production namespace.

env:
  NODE_ENV: production
  AURA_SECRET_KEY: ${{ secrets.AURA_SECRET_KEY }}
  NEXT_PUBLIC_AURA_SLUG: narek

For staging environments, create a separate AuraImage project (with its own slug) rather than using dev storage. Dev storage is not guaranteed to persist between deployments.

MCP in Dev Mode

When the MCP server runs locally (NODE_ENV !== 'production'), all migrate_assets uploads go to dev storage. The agent will note this:

"I've migrated 8 images to your dev storage (dev-narek). Review the results, then run aura promote to move them to production."

Promoting Dev Images to Production

When you are happy with your dev uploads, promote them to production without re-uploading:

aura promote --from dev-narek --to narek

This copies the images in R2 (no egress cost) and updates the URLs in your codebase.