WordPress Multi-Environment Config

VIA Studio has development, staging, and production environments for each of our WordPress projects. All requiring specific configurations. This repository contains our typical config setup, which supports multiple environments. This set up allows us to move through environments without having to change the config by hand each time.

How it works

Most all of the WordPress configuration is handled by wp-config.php. We added a few lines to wp-config.php to essentially sniff out the current environment. Then we include a configuration file for that environment to set any specific options. Any additional configurations are set in favor of the production environment. As WordPress is a production-ready system, this makes the most sense. It's also a fail safe so to ensure production remains stable.

An example of our wp-config.dev.php

// MySQL settings
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'my_wp_db');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'root');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'xxx');

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

define('WP_DEBUG', false);

// used to override the wp_options and dynamically set the site for this environment
// http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#WordPress_address_.28URL.29
define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']);
define('WP_HOME', 'http://' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']);

// used to determine environment from easily accessible constant
define('VIA_ENVIRONMENT', 'dev');

This file configures the MySQL configuration for the development environment. In addition, this allows developers to quickly turn on debugging. Note that setting WP_SITEURL and WP_HOME are critical for the development and staging environments. This allows us to override the values in the wp_options table, which is set for production. Finally, we also define an environment flag, VIA_ENVIRONMENT, that allows us to perform any environment specific logic in our WordPress code.

Environment values

Environment values can be whatever you like. They match to their corresponding config wp-config.{environment}.php config file.

Common environment values we use at VIA Studio include:

• prod (the live website)
• stage (the test website for client review)
• dev (the development copy of the website)

Setting the environment

You can edit the few lines in wp-config.php file that check HTTP_HOST and define what hostnames are used for which environments.

For example, to set example.local as the development environment and staging.example.com as the staging environment, the code would look like this:

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], 'example.local') !== false) {

    $config_file = 'config/wp-config.dev.php';

} elseif (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], 'staging.example.com') !== false) {

    $config_file = 'config/wp-config.stage.php';

} else {

    $config_file = 'config/wp-config.prod.php';
}

Note that the default config is production so we didn't need to add a statement to check for exampmle.com. You could also remove or add additional environments here if you need them.

Installing

1. First make a backup of your existing wp-config.php file.
2. Copy wp-config.php and the config/ folder into your WordPress installation.
3. Set up the website environments for your project in wp-config.php.
4. Create one config/wp-config.{environment}.php file for each environment. config/wp-config.prod.php is the only required environment configuration.
5. Review your backup wp-config.php file and copy config settings to either wp-config.php or config/wp-config.prod.php as appropritate. Environment specific configurations, such as database settings should go into config/wp-config.prod.php, while general configurations such as $table_prefix should go into wp-config.php.
6. Update each of your config files by setting the environment specific configurations