How to detect environment in CLI?

Some solutions to choose from:

• use config.ini and config.ini.dist strategy (.dist read when the other is not present)
• set some environment variable in .htaccess or virtual host config and read it using getenv
• check for existence of some file which does not exist on the other machine
• compare the current script path
• determine server IP

Basically, you just need to compare anything that differs on those two machines, or set some variable as a reference.

Edit after comment to the question:

Example with .htaccess:

In .htaccess (only on the staging server):

SetEnv APPLICATION_ENVIRONMENT staging 

In your PHP script:

if ('staging' === getenv('APPLICATION_ENVIRONMENT')) { // use config_staging.ini } else { // use config_develop.ini } 

Note you may have everything in one config file, just divide it to sections.

I think this may be called a good practice, as it is recommended in Zend Framework manual.

If you have access to the console (you have for sure in the development environment), you may set this flag via shell variable:

export APPLICATION_ENVIRONMENT=development 

on Windows:

SET APPLICATION_ENVIRONMENT=development 

and then read it using getenv from PHP.

if (PHP_SAPI === 'cli') { echo 'running in console!'; }