¶Web Dashboard Overview

The DotEnv web dashboard is where you manage everything that the CLI and SDKs talk to: organizations, projects, secrets, encryption keys, API keys, team members, and billing. This page explains how the dashboard is laid out and the core hierarchy that all of DotEnv is built around.

¶Signing in

The dashboard lives behind authentication. To reach it you need to:

1. Register an account or log in at /login.
2. Verify your email — until you do, you are redirected to the verification notice and most of the app is unavailable.
3. Pass two-factor authentication if it is enabled on your account or enforced by your organization.

Once signed in, you land on the dashboard home at /dashboard.

¶The hierarchy

Everything in DotEnv is organized into a strict, five-level hierarchy. Understanding it is the single most important concept in the whole product:

Organization        (your account / company; identified by a unique ID)
  └── Project        (an application or service; identified by a slug)
       └── Target     (a deployment context, e.g. "backend", "web"; a slug)
            └── Environment   (e.g. production, staging, development, local; a slug)
                 └── Secret    (the actual key/value variables, stored encrypted)

• An Organization owns billing, members, teams, and API keys. You can belong to more than one and switch between them.
• A Project groups everything for one application.
• A Target lets you split a project into separate deployment contexts (for example a backend service and a frontend app, or different regions).
• An Environment is where secrets actually live. Each environment has a status (Production, Staging, Development, Local, or a custom value).
• Secrets are the environment variables themselves. They are stored encrypted and edited through the Multi-Level Secret Editor.

¶Secrets merge most-specific-wins

Secrets can be set at the project, target, and environment levels. When a value is pulled (by the CLI, an SDK, or shown merged in the editor), the levels are combined so that the most specific level wins:

environment  ➜  overrides target  ➜  overrides project

This lets you define shared defaults once at the project level and override only what differs in a specific target or environment. See Managing Secrets for the full details.

¶Navigating the dashboard

The main areas you will use are:

¶Switching organizations

If you belong to multiple organizations, you switch the active organization from the organization switcher. Everything you see in the dashboard — projects, secrets, members, billing — always belongs to the currently active organization.

¶Where to go next

• New to DotEnv? Start with Organizations, then Projects, Targets & Environments.
• Ready to add secrets? See Managing Secrets.
• Connecting the CLI or an SDK? Create an API Key.
• Concerned about encryption? Read Encryption Keys.