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.

Brad Parbs

<p>Any <code>WPENV_</code> prefixed variables in the <code>.env</code> will be used to override the WordPress options. For example, if you’d like to set a specific environment to “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”, you can add <code>WPENV_BLOG_PUBLIC=0</code> to your <code>.env</code> file.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Any option in the <code>wp_options</code> table or retrieved by <code>get_option()</code> can be set this way.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>You can define keys either as <code>WPENV_BLOGDESCRIPTION</code> or as <code>WPENV_blogdescription</code>, both will work.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>If you’d like to define the location of your <code>.env</code> file, rather than the plugin looking for it, you can filter <code>dotenv_location</code> to be a directory path.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>You can also change the <code>WPENV_</code> prefix by filtering <code>dotev_key_prefix</code> to be a different prefix.</p>
</li>
</ul>


dotenv

A WordPress plugin to set WordPress options from a .env file.

EnvBeacon vs dotenv