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.

Andrés Villarreal

<p><strong>VERY IMPORTANT:</strong> This plugin is deprecated and will not be mantained anymore. Please consider using <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/stage-wp-plugin-manager/" rel="ugc">Stage WP Plugin Manager</a> instead.</p>
<p>If you develop locally, at some point you’ll have some plugins active in your local environment that you don’t need anymore when you deploy your code and database to staging or production. Sure, you can deactivate them before or after deploying, but you’re gonna need them again to be active if you want to perform changes to your code, or update your local database from your remote one. The whole process of activate and deactivate plugins for testing purposes could be really frustrating, and sometimes a complete waste of time.</p>
<p>Is in that kind of situations when the <strong>Environmental Plugin Manager</strong> can be a really helpful friend. Sadly, due to the sentitive work that this plugin performs, it doesn’t work right out of the box, so besides from installing this plugin, you need to do some additional work.</p>
<p><strong>Please read the following instructions very carefully.</strong></p>
<h4>What do I need to make it work?</h4>
<p><strong>The Environmental Plugin Manager works on some assumptions about your workflow:</strong></p>
<ol>
<li>You have a constant named <code>WP_ENV_PLUGINS</code> defined in your WordPress configuration file (often <code>wp-config.php</code>).</li>
<li>The <code>WP_ENV_PLUGINS</code> value is one of the following: <code>development</code>, <code>staging</code>, <code>production</code>.</li>
<li>
<p>The value of <code>WP_ENV_PLUGINS</code> is different in each of your stages. Some developers prefer to keep different configuration files for each one of their environments, or change the values of their constants based on some evaluation. For example, you could have something like this in your <code>wp-config.php</code> file:</p>
<p>if ( file_exists( dirname( <strong>FILE</strong> ) . ‘/development-config.php’ ) ) {     define(‘WP_ENV_PLUGINS’, ‘development’); } elseif ( file_exists( dirname( <strong>FILE</strong> ) . ‘/staging-config.php’ ) ) {     define(‘WP_ENV_PLUGINS’, ‘staging’); } else {     define(‘WP_ENV_PLUGINS’, ‘production’); }</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>If you follow this example, note that <code>development-config.php</code> should not be included in your deployments to staging and production, and both <code>development-config.php</code> and <code>staging-config.php</code> should not exist in your production environment.</p>
<p><strong>These assumptions are not going to change</strong>, so you need to follow this practice in order to use this plugin correctly.</p>
<h4>How do I set up my environment?</h4>
<p>Once you have installed this plugin (my recommendation is to do it first in development), you will notice that a new link appears under each active plugin of the list, which reads “Use for development only” (note that “development” could also be “staging” or “production”, depending on your <code>WP_ENV_PLUGINS</code> constant). Keep that in mind and follow these steps:</p>
<ol>
<li>Activate all the plugins that you need to use for your environment.</li>
<li>Click the “Use for development only” link for all the plugins you want to mark as development-only.</li>
</ol>
<p>Once you click a link, that plugin will be added to the list of plugins that need to be active only in the current environment. You can click the “No more development only” link if you want to remove the plugin from the list.</p>
<h4>How do I reset my environment after a deploy?</h4>
<p>Once you performed a complete deploy (files and database) to a different environment, let’s say from development to staging, you will see that those plugins you selected in development to be active only in that environment are still active. Fear not! This is an intended behavior, as it would be insecure to change the status of the plugins without your knowledge, so you need to do it manually by just clicking the “Reset Plugins Environment (staging)” button that you see in your admin bar. After that, you should see your development-only plugins as not active.</p>
<p>That’s pretty much it. You can test it yourself before deploying by just changing the values of <code>WP_ENV_PLUGINS</code>.</p>
<h4>Auto-reset mode</h4>
<p>If you prefer your environments to be reset automatically, without clicking any button, you can add a second constant to your configuration file, called <code>WP_ENV_PLUGINS_AUTO_RESET</code>, which should be set to <code>true</code>. If you use this method, you won’t see the reset button in the admin bar anymore (instead, it will be replaced by an environment indicator), but keep in mind that the reset process will run every time a page of your site is loaded. It shouldn’t take a lot of resources, though.</p>
<p>If you use the auto-reset process, using this plugin as a <a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Must_Use_Plugins" rel="nofollow ugc">must-use</a> will be a lot more effective.</p>
<h4>Will this plugin work on MultiSite installations?</h4>
<p>If you’re using MultiSite, please note that you can activate and deactivate this plugin globally, but you cannot manage plugin environments for the whole network, just for individual sites. Also, this plugin cannot manage network activated plugins. This is in the to-do list, though.</p>
<h4>Contribute</h4>
<p>You can make suggestions and submit your own modifications to this plugin on <a href="https://github.com/andrezrv/environmental-plugin-manager" rel="nofollow ugc">Github</a>.</p>


Environmental Plugin Manager

Gives you the option to define which plugins must be active for a particular environment only.

EnvBeacon vs Environmental Plugin Manager