In the same way that you can generate specific content based on browser type is there a way to generate specific content based on the server running PHP without reference to the server or site name?
For example, a way for PHP to automatically detect the environment it was in and configure things like DB connections, ini_set for errors etc. depending if it was a development, ITS, UAT or production environment.
The 2 ways I thought of were to recognise an HTTP header indicating development and QA environments or to have custom properties in php.ini.
I have woken up slightly and found out the php function to read the http headers but php overrides anything I set in the web server and I do not know if they can be set in php.ini at all.
I have no idea if it is possible to add custom values to php.ini but I had a test and ini_get would not find it (I had restarted the web server after changing php.ini of course).
Using FastCGI on IIS you can set Environment variables. They do not seem to be available to $_ENV but can be retrieved with getenv("varname").
To configure FastCGI environment variables in IIS 5 or 6 you need to edit: C:\%systemdrive%\system32\inetsrv\fcgiext.ini
For example:
[Types]
php=d:\Dev\PHP\php-cgi.exe
php:1=PHP Site 1
*=Wildcard Mapping
[d:\Dev\PHP\php-cgi.exe]
QueueLength=999
MaxInstances=20
InstanceMaxRequests=500
[PHP Site 1]
ExePath=d:\Dev\PHP\php-cgi.exe
EnvironmentVars=PHPRC:d:\Dev\PHP\,SiteType:Developer
In this instance it is IIS 5 so there is only one site and the site ID is 1 as indicated in line 2 of [Types].
On IIS 6 you may have multiple sites and the following link tells you how to find the Site ID: http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2005/07/29/how-to-find-the-siteid-in-iis5-and-iis6.aspx.
IIS 7 can be configured via the UI apparently once the Administration Pack for IIS 7 has been installed.