Modes play a crucial role in Magento's development and deployment processes. They are handled by the deploy module, which can be found under the <MAGENTO_DIR>/module-deploy directory.

The built-in php bin/magento command provides us with the following deploy commands:

deploy
 deploy:mode:set Set application mode.
  deploy:mode:show Displays current application mode.

We already used the deploy:mode:set developer command to switch from default to developer mode.

Magento differentiates between following three modes:

• default: The default after-install mode:
  • Not optimized for production
  • Symlinks to static view files are published to the pub/static directory
  • Errors and exceptions are not shown to the user, as they are logged to the filesystem
  • Should avoid using it
• developer: For development systems only:
  • Symlinks to static view files are published to the pub/static directory
  • Provides verbose logging
  • Enables automatic code compilation
  • Enables enhanced debugging
  • Slowest performance
• production: For production systems:
  • Errors and exceptions are not shown to the user, as they are logged to the filesystem
  • Static view files are not materialized, as they are served from the cache only
  • Automatic code file compilation is disabled, as new or updated files are not written to the filesystem
  • Enabling and disabling the cache types is not possible from the Magento admin
  • Fastest performance