How to determine local environment in PHP

In the process of web development, determining whether the environment is local or not is a very common task. Such a determination is necessary if you want to enable certain features or debug modes only in the local environment.

The following is a basic code example that uses PHP to determine the local environment

$is_local = false; 
if ((strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"], 'localhost') ! == false) || (strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"], '192.168.') ! == false)) { 
 $is_local = true; 
}

This code checks the hostname using the $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"] variable. If the hostname contains ‘localhost’ or ‘192.168.’, it is considered a local environment.

This method is useful for simple local environment detection, but must be adjusted appropriately if you are using a different local domain or IP address range.

Proper use of this technique can easily control for differences in behavior between development and production environments.