Environment bar - Moodle local plugin

This displays a prominment header across across the top of your NON PROD Moodle
environments which can be configured to have different colors and messages for
each environent, and also automatically detects and show you when the DB was
last refreshed.

It's very useful when working with lots of different environments to avoid
confusion around where you are, especially when env's can contain hard coded
links and you accidentally jump between environments.

Principals

Showing what environment you are in needs to be reliable and fail safe.

If it doesn't work for any reason then you may as well not have it. The way
this plugin works is that in your production system you specify what your
different environments are. Then after a refresh of production data back to a
staging environment it can auto detect that it is no longer in production and
warn the end user. Further more if there isn't any config at all, then it will
assume you are in a fresh development environment that hasn't been refreshed
and show a default fail safe warning.

It will also automatically detect and show you when the environment was last
refreshed from production, which is a common question testers ask.

Branches

| Moodle version | Totara version | Branch | PHP |
|--------------------|------------------|-------------------|------|
| Moodle 4.5+ | | MOODLE_405_STABLE | 8.1+ |
| Moodle 3.10 to 4.4 | Totara 13 to 17 | VERSION3 | 7.3+ |
| Moodle 3.3 to 3.9 | Totara 12 | VERSION2 | 7.0+ |
| Moodle 2.7 to 3.2 | Totara 2.7 to 11 | VERSION1 | 5.5+ |

Installation

Add the plugin to /local/envbar/

Run the Moodle upgrade.

Configuration

Upon first installation you will see a notification across the screen that prodwwwroot has not been set. There is a convenient link in the bar to:

Site administration > Plugins > Local Plugins > Environment bar

Please set this value to be exactly what your production $CFG->wwwroot is. If you are on the production box then you can click on the 'autofill' button.

Or you can define the environments and prodwwwroot in config.php:

$CFG->local_envbar_prodwwwroot = 'http://moodle.prod';

$CFG->local_envbar_items = array(

    array(

        'matchpattern' => 'https://staging.moodle.edu',

        'showtext'     => 'Staging environment',

        'colourbg'     => 'orange',

        'colourtext'   => 'white',

        'refreshschedule' => 'third sunday of this month 12 pm',

    ),

    array(

        'matchpattern' => 'https://qa.moodle.edu',

        'showtext'     => 'QA environment',

        'colourbg'     => 'purple',

        'colourtext'   => 'white',

        'refreshschedule' => '2025-03-16 12:00pm',

    ),

    array(

        'matchpattern' => 'http://moodle.local',

        'showtext'     => 'Localhost environment',

        'colourbg'     => 'black',

        'colourtext'   => 'white',

        'refreshschedule' => 1742090400,

    ),

);

In Moodle Workplace, domain-per-tenant is supported.
To enable secondary production URLs, add $CFG->allowmultipledomains = true to config.php.
The related setting will then appear on the plugin’s settings page.

The colours available are,

black

white

red

green

seagreen

yellow

brown

blue

slateblue

chocolate

crimson

orange

darkorange

Please configure a secret key which is needed to let the environments talk to each other. If no secret key is set,
the non production environments won't be able to detect their last reset time. Please set it to some random alphanumeric string
of your choice or press the 'Generate' button.
Or you can define the secret key in config.php:

$CFG->local_envbar_secretkey = 'SomeRandomAlphanumericalString';

In your non production environments it is also useful to inform your users when the
next refresh will be. This time can be set via the environment refresh schedule.