# Environment management As website developers, we noticed that we had a few problems. You may have the same problems: * On our development laptops, we have a number of sites, but the database connection details are the same for each of them. Why should we have to go through the installation process and re-enter them each time? * Each of those sites needed to be in development mode when we were editing them on our laptops, but in production mode when we deploy them to our servers. Additionally, our production host's database connection details will likely be different than our local server. SilverStripe comes with a solution to this: the "_ss_environment.php" file. You can put a single _ss_environment.php file in your "projects" folder on your development box, and it will be used by each of your development sites. ## Setting up your development machine with _ss_environment.php In this example, we assume that you are managing multiple projects as subfolders of "~/Sites/", and that you can visit these at "http://localhost/". For example, you might have a project at "~/Sites/myproject/", and visit it at "http://localhost/myproject/". Create a new file, ~/Sites/_ss_environment.php. Put the following content in it, editing the values of the "SS_DATABASE_..."" and "SS_DEFAULT_ADMIN_..." defines as appropriate. :::php '); // This sets a prefix, which is prepended to the $database variable. This is // helpful mainly on shared hosts, when every database has a prefix. define('SS_DATABASE_PREFIX', 'simon_'); // These two lines are a bit complicated. If I'm connecting to the server from // 127.0.0.1 or MyIP and I'm using a browser with a + in the UserAgent, the site // is put in dev mode, otherwise it is put in live mode. Most sites would only // need to put the site in either dev or live mode, thus wont need the IP checks if(isset($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']) && ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] == '127.0.0.1' || ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] == '' && strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], '+') !== false))) define('SS_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE', 'dev'); else define('SS_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE', 'live'); // These two defines sets a default login which, when used, will always log // you in as an admin, even creating one if none exist. define('SS_DEFAULT_ADMIN_USERNAME', ''); define('SS_DEFAULT_ADMIN_PASSWORD', ''); // This causes errors to be written to the silverstripe.log file in the same directory as this file, so /var. // Before PHP 5.3.0, you'll need to use dirname(__FILE__) instead of __DIR__ define('SS_ERROR_LOG', __DIR__ . '/silverstripe.log'); // This is used by sake to know which directory points to which URL global $_FILE_TO_URL_MAPPING; $_FILE_TO_URL_MAPPING['/var/www'] = 'http://simon.geek.nz';