Code Igniter Multi Environments

I've been used having mutli stage environments in my code for years now. To me at least it is a 'must have'. Recently I had to port an oldish version of Code Igniter to this sort of function to allow automatic deploys. An undocumneted (or at least I think it is undocumented from what I could see) is the ability to do this in CI. However it only allows three environments - production, development and testing. Now this is about 90% of the cases but I am an anal sortta fella and I like the following stages on my systems:

LIVE - obvious
UAT - customer facing or internal qa
TESTING - obvious
SANDBOX - staff/team facing
LOCAL - what others call 'dev' I suppose

Some of the above are carbon copies of each other - for instance in anything I do the difference between LIVE, UAT and TESTING is negligible. SANDBOX is mainly where I would shove up daft ideas or proof of concepts and LOCAL is just for me to do whatever I want. However they should all be technically different environments as each one is subtly different.

As it happens the version of CI I was using didn't have the ability to do the different environments - not that it would have mattered anyway as I wanted to have the five different enviros. I don't want to re-write anything in the CI core package - that way lies trouble. So I just hacked in the most elegant way I could.

#### index.php

/*
|---------------------------------------------------------------
| EVNIRONMENT NAME
|---------------------------------------------------------------
| 
| Basically what server are we on and then set the ENVIRONMENT
| accordingly.
|
*/

if ((!empty($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'])) && preg_match('^/your\.domain\.com$/', $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']) > 0) {
        DEFINE ('ENVIRONMENT', 'live');
} elseif ((!empty($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'])) && preg_match('/whateverconvention\.domain\.com$/', $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']) > 0) {
    DEFINE ('ENVIRONMENT', 'uat');
} elseif ((!empty($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'])) && preg_match('/whateverconvention\.domain\.com$/', $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']) > 0) {
    DEFINE ('ENVIRONMENT', 'sandbox');
} else {
    DEFINE ('ENVIRONMENT', 'local');
}

#### application/config/config.php

$base_url = array(
        'live'          => 'http://your.yourdomain.com',
        'local'         => 'http://localhost:3000',
        'uat'           => 'http://whateverconvention.yourdomain.com',
        'sandbox'       => 'http:/whateverconvention.yourdomain.com',
        'testing'       => 'http://localhost',
);

$config['base_url'] = $base_url[ENVIRONMENT];

#### application/config/db.php

$connection = array(
        'live'  => array( 'host' => '44.22.33.11', 'username' => 'user', 'password' => 'password'),
        'local' => array( 'host' => 'localhost', 'username' => 'user', 'password' => 'password'),
        'uat'   => array( 'host' => '23.56.78.11', 'username' => 'user', 'password' => 'password'),
        'sandbox' => array( 'host' => 'localhost', 'username' => 'user', 'password' => 'password'),
);

$db['default']['hostname'] = $connection[ENVIRONMENT]['host'];
$db['default']['username'] = $connection[ENVIRONMENT]['username'];
$db['default']['password'] = $connection[ENVIRONMENT]['password'];

It isn't very sophistcated but it would be gret if CI could take whatever you define as the ENVIRONMENT inside index.php and then it looks for the files in application/config/ENVIRONMENT. But sure - this works and maybe it will help someone else out.

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Code Igniter Multi Environments