Admin Bar Internal Alert

🛑 Visual Environment Safety for WordPress

Admin Bar Internal Alert helps prevent costly mistakes by making it immediately obvious when you are working on a development or staging site.

When installed, it adds a highly visible environment indicator to the WordPress admin bar and ensures it remains active even after migrations, restores, or sync operations.

This plugin is intentionally simple, dependency-free, and built for real-world WordPress workflows.

🔧 How It Works

• Installs a small must-use (MU) plugin on first activation

• The MU plugin:

  • Turns the admin bar red on development environments

  • Displays a clear DEV or STAGING label

  • Loads on both frontend and admin screens

• The installer automatically deactivates itself after setup

Once installed, the environment indicator cannot be accidentally disabled via the Plugins screen.

🧠 Environment Detection

The plugin safely identifies non-production environments using:

• Internal IP ranges (10.x.x.x, 192.168.x.x, 172.16–31.x.x)

• Common development and staging hostnames

• Localhost and containerized environments

No configuration required.

🔐 Integrity & Safety

• Idempotent installation (won’t reinstall unnecessarily)

• SHA-256 hash verification prevents tampering

• Automatically repairs the MU plugin if modified

• No data collection

• No external requests

• No database writes

🧰 WP-CLI Support

For automated or locked-down environments:

Install

Uninstall

🗑 Uninstalling

Because this tool installs as a must-use plugin, it is not removed through the standard Plugins screen.

Supported uninstall options:

• WP-CLI (recommended):

  wp vi uninstall-internal-alert


• Manual removal:
  Delete the following file:

  wp-content/mu-plugins/admin-bar-internal-alert.php


No database cleanup is required.

❤️ Support Development

This plugin is provided free of charge.

If it saves you from pushing a change to the wrong environment, consider supporting development:

👉 Donate via Stripe