Entity Hierarchy

Every piece of content in Brease follows a strict ownership and scoping chain. Understanding this hierarchy is key to working with the CMS and the brease-next package.

The Hierarchy

Team
└── Site
    └── Environment (e.g., main, staging)
        ├── Pages
        │   └── Page Sections (ordered content blocks)
        ├── Sections (schema definitions)
        ├── Collections
        │   └── Entries (individual records)
        ├── Templates (ordered bundles of sections)
        ├── Page Types (template + reference fields)
        ├── Navigations
        │   └── Navigation Items (nested tree)
        ├── Redirects
        ├── Media (files + variants)
        └── Locales (language/region codes)

Ownership Chain

Teams own Sites. A team is the top-level organizational unit. All billing, membership, and permissions are managed at the team level. A team can own multiple sites.

Sites have Environments. Each site has at least one environment. Environments let you maintain separate content contexts — for example, a main environment for production and a staging environment for preview.

Environments scope content. Everything below the environment level — pages, sections, collections, navigations, redirects, media, and locales — is environment-scoped. The same section can exist in both main and staging with completely different content.

Environment Scoping

This is the most important architectural concept: all content is scoped to an environment.

• A page in main and a page in staging with the same slug are independent entities
• Sections defined in main do not exist in staging unless explicitly created there
• Collection entries, navigations, and redirects are all per-environment
• Media files are shared at the site level but their usage in content is per-environment

Default Environment and Default Page

Each site has a default environment — typically main. This is the environment used for production deployments.

Each environment has a default page — the page served at the root URL (/). This is usually your homepage.

API Access

The brease-next package identifies which environment to fetch from using two values:

These are set as environment variables in your Next.js project:

BREASE_ENV=your_environment_uuid
BREASE_TOKEN=your_api_token

Every fetch function in brease-next — fetchPage(), fetchCollectionById(), fetchNavigation(), etc. — automatically uses these values. You never need to pass the environment or token manually.