Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you needed to have unicorn riding space-cats appear only in your Local environment?

Yeah me too.

What’s the Problem?

When doing web development, you likely have found yourself in a situation where you wanted to have only certain things happening in certain environments.

For example, if you use Stripe on your website, you probably only want users to be charged when running in the production environment. When working on the staging, development, or Local environments, wouldn’t it be nice to use Stripe’s test data instead of real customer’s credit cards?

What about emails? When fiddling with a new mail sending feature, wouldn’t it be great to have all emails within the development environment go to your email as opposed to the end-user’s email?

There’s likely many other situations where you want only certain things happening in certain environments. Until recently, if you wanted that functionality, you had to create it on your own, and many popular plugins have implemented their own solutions:

• How Does [WooCommerce] Subscriptions Handle Staging Sites and Migrations?
• Jetpack Staging Sites

It’s certainly clever how some of these solutions are implemented (See the code on Github for: jetpack and wp-rocket), but ultimately it’s hard to share solutions when there isn’t one agreed-upon standard and every developer is having to re-invent the wheel.

Improvements to WordPress Core

With the release of WordPress 5.5, WP Core now includes the ability for developers to define a site’s environment type.

In particular, this release provides us with the wp_get_environment_type() function which returns one of four values:

Development is Easier with Local

This sort of clarity from WordPress core is awesome and allows plugin authors and site developers to have clear expectations about what capabilities an environment has!

Many plugins and development tools still need to be updated to make use of this functionality, but the most recent version of Local has all the configuration you need to program things only for local environments!

To get started:

1. Make sure you have the latest version of Local from the Releases page.
2. Ensure that the version of WordPress Core is at least 5.5
3. Add your custom code!

Using the above space-cat example, you can hook into the wp_head action and output inline styles like this:

add_action('wp_head', 'local_space_cat');
function local_space_cat() {
    // Other possible values: 'production' 'staging' 'development'
	if ( 'local' === wp_get_environment_type() ) { ?>
		<style>
			body {
				background-image: url('space-cat-riding-unicorn.jpeg');
			}
		</style>
	<?php }
}