Many WordPress hosts will give your site a “staging” environment. You can also use tools like Local by Flywheel, or MAMP Pro to run a local “dev” version of your site. These are great ways of testing code changes, playing with new plugins, or making theme tweaks, without risking breaking your live “production” site.
Here is my advice for working with different WordPress environments.
Handling Credentials
The live (“production”) version of your site should be opt-in. That is, your site’s Git repo should not store production credentials in wp-config.php. You don’t want something to happen like when this developer accidentally connected to the production database and destroyed all the company data on his first day.
Instead of keeping database credentials in wp-config.php, have wp-config.php look for a local-config.php file. Replace the section that defines the database credentials with something like this:
if ( file_exists( __DIR__ . '/local-config.php' ) ) {
include( __DIR__ . '/local-config.php' );
} else {
die( 'local-config.php not found' );
}
Make sure you add local-config.php to your .gitignore so that no one commits their local version to the repo.
On production, you’ll create a local-config.php with production credentials. On staging or development environments, you’ll create a local-config.php with the credentials for those environments.
Production is a Choice
Right after the section that calls out local-config.php, put something like this:
if ( ! defined( 'WP_ENVIRONMENT' ) ) {
define( 'WP_ENVIRONMENT', 'development' );
}
The idea here is that there will always be a WP_ENVIRONMENT constant available to you that tells you what kind of environment your site is being run in. In production, you will put this in local-config.php along with the database credentials:
define( 'WP_ENVIRONMENT', 'production' );
Now, in your theme, or your custom plugins, or other code, you can do things like this:
if ( 'production' === WP_ENVIRONMENT ) {
add_filter( 'option_gravityformsaddon_gravityformsstripe_settings', function( $stripe_settings ) {
$stripe_settings['api_mode'] = 'live';
return $stripe_settings;
});
} else {
add_filter( 'option_gravityformsaddon_gravityformsstripe_settings', function( $stripe_settings ) {
$stripe_settings['api_mode'] = 'test';
return $stripe_settings;
});
}
This bit of code is for the Easy Digital Downloads Stripe gateway plugin. It makes sure that on the production environment, the payment gateway is always in live mode, and the anywhere else, it is always in test mode. This protects against two very bad situations: connecting to live services from a test environment (which could result in customers being charged for test transactions) and connecting to test services from a live environment (which could prevent customers from purchasing products on your site).
You can also use this pattern to do things like hide Google Analytics on your test sites, or make sure debug plugins are only active on development sites (more on that, in a future post!)
Don’t rely on complicated procedures (“step 34: make sure you go into the Stripe settings and switch the site to test mode on your local test site”) — make these things explicit in code. Make it impossible to screw it up, and working on your sites will become faster and less stressful.
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Mark runs Covered Web Services which specializes in custom WordPress solutions with focuses on security, speed optimization, plugin development and customization, and complex migrations.
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