When you’re dealing with APIs across local, staging, and production, the key is to keep the build artifact the same and only swap configurations per environment.

Typical flow:

- Local: run the API with a dev DB or mocks, fast feedback loop.

- CI: run tests, linting, build Docker image (or artifact).

- Staging: deploy the same artifact with staging configs, run integration/end-to-end tests.

- Production: promote the artifact from staging, only configs change.

A few tips:

- Use environment variables for DB URLs, secrets, etc.

- Store configs in a secure place (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, etc.).

- Automate deployments with blue-green or canary strategies to reduce risk.

This way, you don’t rebuild for each environment — you build once, test in staging, and promote to prod.