Grant Barnard

<p>EnvBeacon is a lightweight WordPress plugin designed for development teams managing multiple WordPress environments (local, staging, production). It displays a color-coded notice bar in the WordPress admin bar, making it instantly clear which environment you’re working on.</p>
<p><strong>Perfect for preventing:</strong><br />
– Accidentally modifying content on live sites<br />
– Publishing changes to staging instead of live<br />
– Confusion when switching between environments</p>
<h3>Features</h3>
<ul>
<li>🎨 Color-coded environment indicators (Red for Live, Blue for Staging, Green for Local)</li>
<li>⚙️ Easy-to-use settings page for URL pattern configuration</li>
<li>🔄 Automatic environment detection based on site URL</li>
<li>📋 Flexible URL patterns (simple strings, wildcards, regex alternation)</li>
<li>🏠 Built-in defaults for local, staging, and live environments</li>
<li>💾 Lightweight – no database overhead</li>
<li>🚀 Universal – works with any WordPress site</li>
</ul>
<h3>Quick Start</h3>
<p><strong>To set up the plugin:</strong></p>
<ol>
<li>In WordPress admin, go to Settings <span aria-hidden="true" class="wp-exclude-emoji">→</span> EnvBeacon</li>
<li>Enter your Live environment URL (e.g., <code>example.com</code>)</li>
<li>Staging patterns come pre-filled with common defaults: <code>stg|staging|stage|qa|dev-staging</code></li>
<li>Local patterns come pre-filled with common defaults: <code>localhost|127.0.0.1|.local|.test</code></li>
<li>Customize patterns and colors as needed</li>
<li>Click Save Changes</li>
</ol>
<p><strong>Default Patterns:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Staging</strong>: <code>stg|staging|stage|qa|dev-staging</code></li>
<li><strong>Local</strong>: <code>localhost|127.0.0.1|.local|.test</code></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Custom Pattern Examples:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><code>example.com</code> – Simple string match</li>
<li><code>*.example.com</code> – Wildcard (matches staging.example.com, qa.example.com, etc.)</li>
<li><code>staging|stage|qa</code> – Regex alternation (matches any of these words)</li>
</ul>
<h3>Usage</h3>
<p>Once activated and configured, the EnvBeacon will:</p>
<ol>
<li>Check your site’s URL on each page load</li>
<li>Match it against your configured patterns</li>
<li>Display a colored indicator in the WordPress admin bar</li>
<li>Show the environment name (Live, Staging, or Local)</li>
</ol>
<p>No further configuration needed!</p>
<h3>Support</h3>
<p>For support, questions, or feature requests, please visit the plugin support forum or check the documentation in the settings page.</p>
<p>The plugin includes detailed URL pattern syntax help in the settings page to guide you through configuration.</p>
<h3>License</h3>
<p>This plugin is licensed under the GPL v2 or later.</p>
<h3>Credits</h3>
<p>Built for development teams who need clear environment indication.</p>


EnvBeacon

Display a colored notice in the WordPress admin bar to indicate which environment (Live, Staging, Local) your site is running on.

Mark Jaquith

mrwweb

Roy Tanck

Stoil Dobreff

tekapo

tflight

<p>WordPress 5.5 introduced a way to differentiate between environment types (development, staging, production). This plugin shows your site’s environment type in the admin bar and the dashboard “At a Glance” widget.</p>
<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2020/07/24/new-wp_get_environment_type-function-in-wordpress-5-5/" rel="nofollow ugc">More info about the feature</a></p>
<p>To gain additional control — for example, setting the environment or other values from the WP admin (when <code>wp-config.php</code> is writable) — consider installing our other plugin <strong><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/0-day-analytics/" rel="ugc">0 Day Analytics</a></strong>.</p>
<h3>Recommended Plugins</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/0-day-analytics/" rel="ugc">0 Day Analytics</a> — a powerful plugin for sites that need more insight into errors and runtime behavior. It includes a Cron manager, a Transient manager (database-backed), DB manager, Snippet manager, Mail manager, Plugin Version Switcher available from the Plugins page and many more.</li>
</ul>


Display Environment Type

Have you ever accidentally added test content to a productive website?

You can now define a constant in your wp-config.php to distinguish between development, staging and productuion sites. To make this visible, this lean but helpful plugin adds an indicator to the admin bar and dashboard widget which helps to avoid mistakes as adding "Lorem ipsum" to your productive site. :)

Plugin works like a charm. No settings needed. Install, activate and feel happy.

Nice little helper


Five stars for Display Environment Type! 



Huge thanks to the author for creating this gem. The plugin might be small, but it's incredibly useful, doing exactly what you'd expect without any unnecessary clutter. No settings hassle – just install and get to work seamlessly.


This is what a developer needs

Displays WordPress 5.5's environment type setting in the admin bar and the "At a Glance" dashboard widget.

EnvBeacon vs Display Environment Type