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Visually Indicate Develpmont Vs. Production Environments

Jason Sendelbach, Thursday, February 5, 2009 @ 11:30 am

After my BA added "My Test Project" to production, I wanted to try to prevent this kind of behavior in the future. I added "Environment: Development" in the header of the layout. This was nice, but it was so subtle, I wouldn't think it would prevent you from making the same mistake. So, I had the visual designer create 3 separate background images for Development, Staging and Production (well this one was already there). I then conditionally modified the style in the application layout head section:

<head>

<style type="text/css">
<% if RAILS_ENV == 'development' %>
body { background-image: url(/images/bkgrnd_dev.gif); }
<% elsif RAILS_ENV == 'staging' %>
body { background-image: url(/images/bkgrnd_staging.gif); }
<% end %>
</style>

</head>

Now, whenever I am in development I can clearly tell. Staging also looks different. So now, it's really easy to tell that you are in production, right before you add some crappy test data.

Related posts:

Topics: Rails Environment Tests

Comments (2)

Software Development

Software Development

Comments: 2 so far

I couldn’t agree more. We had massive problems with clients confusing their dev and production CMSs at my last job. We eventually settled on a MASSIVE fixed position flashing animated gif banner at the top of the layout for dev sites. It worked.

Comment by Jamie Thompson, Thursday, February 5, 2009 @ 2:37 pm
[...] Visually Indicate Develpmont Vs. Production Environments [...]

Pingback by Ennuyer.net » Blog Archive » 2009-02-14- Today’s Ruby/Rails Reading (forgot to publish this), Friday, March 13, 2009 @ 3:14 pm

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