Addon to return different values based on environment?

Question

My project links to an external form. Once that external form is submitted, the user is brought back to the ee site. I need to send the form a param (ie ?action=dev) to tell it which environment to return to. We currently have dev, client review, staging (excessive much?) and will eventually have the live site.

I don't want to have to remember to change these external links when updating. One of the links is a Low Variables var so I can't php strpos and it's not even letting me do an if statement on the value of site_url.

Does a plugin or extension exist that will help me out?

Thanks Amanda

Answer 1

This is what the assign_to_config array in your main index.php file is for (assuming you're not using something like FocusLab Master Config, which makes multi-environment really easy). If you don't want to use that approach, the quick way is to just crack open your index.php file, scroll down to the bit where assign_to_config gets set, and create some global variables based on, say, the $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] var.

Here's a quick example using a switch statement to determine local/dev/live environment and setting some global variables accordingly (I use this as a quick and easy method for displaying draft content on the dev site):

switch($_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"]) { 
    case "dev.site.com" :
        $assign_to_config['global_vars']['gv_site'] = 'dev';
        $assign_to_config['global_vars']['gv_entry_statuses'] = 'open|Draft';
        $assign_to_config['site_url'] = "http://dev.site.com/"; // if you don't set this, it's taken from the database instead
        break;

    case "www.site.com" :
    case "site.com" :   
        $assign_to_config['global_vars']['gv_site'] = 'live';
        $assign_to_config['global_vars']['gv_entry_statuses'] = 'open';
        break;

    case "site.dev" :
    case "localhost" :
        $assign_to_config['global_vars']['gv_site'] = 'dev';
        $assign_to_config['global_vars']['gv_entry_statuses'] = 'open';
        $assign_to_config['site_url'] = "http://site.dev/";
        break;
}

You can then use {gv_site} anywhere in your templates.