Using Code to Determine If You’re On a WP Engine Site

NOTE: This is only applicable for legacy staging environments and their respective “live” WP Engine environments. For determining an environment name or environment by its type try the WP Engine API.

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If your workflow includes writing code outside of WP Engine’s environment, and you need a way to differentiate between a WP Engine environment a legacy staging environment in your code you can use is_wpe().

is_wpe() is a function that we have integrated into our platform to help you determine if you are running on a WP Engine environment.

• This function returns true 1 only if you are on the “live” WP Engine site (i.e. it is a WP Engine site, and it is not Legacy staging).
• The output of this function is not boolean (e.g. is_wpe()===true will always return false) but instead is a numeric string (1 == true and 0 == false).

is_wpe_snapshot() is a similar function that returns true 1 only if you are running on a WP Engine 1-click legacy staging environment.

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When to use the is_wpe() function

If you are developing on a local environment and you want to test whether the site you’re seeing is on WP Engine or not, you can use something like the following within a test file in the root directory of your website:

<?php
# Use WordPress functions outside of WordPress files
define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
global $wp, $wp_query, $wp_the_query, $wp_rewrite, $wp_did_header;
require('wp-load.php');
# Ensure the function exists before running it and printing out the return value.
if (function_exists('is_wpe')) {
 echo is_wpe();
} else {
 echo "The function does not exist";
}

Visiting yourdomain.com/testfile.php will then print one of the following:

• 1 if the site is running on a WP Engine production environment
• 0 if it is not running on a WP Engine production environment
• The function does not exist if the is_wpe() function has not been defined in your environment (this should never be the case on a WP Engine server as long as our mu-plugin is installed).