Best way to tell if in production or development environment in .NET

Question

I would like to send email differently on production then the development environment, such as sending emails only to me while testing. I know that I can set an application value in the webconfig file or check the url before sending the emails. I would like to know what is the best practice for doing this or if there is some other option that I don't know about that might be better? Any information on this topic would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I use what's called Preprocessor Directives (in C#). In VB it's called Directives only.

I have a helper method like this:

public static bool IsDebug()
{
    #if DEBUG
        return true;
    #else
        return false;
    #endif
}

Then anywhere in the code one can call this method and during runtime and it'll tell if the code is being run in Debug ( development ) or if it's the Release version ( production ).

Here's the equivalent #If...Then...#Else Directives in (VB).

Answer 2

If you want to only send the email to yourself if it's not Production then do it by changing the email address on the "To" field.

So either change it in the database or config file, wherever you put that value.

The way the application determines if you are in the development server is with the "ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT".

You can check this link, Use multiple environments in ASP.NET Core

Answer 3

Well, only you can determine what's production and what's development, so a flag in web.config is ok, but a more elegant solution would involve a pattern like Dependency Injection (DI) ala Spring.Net, StructureMap, and Castle Windsor to name a few.

The key concept behind DI is decoupling/isolating variations in an implementation by dynamically providing information about what class to instantiate at runtime. In this case, for instance, all your code would be written to deal with a 'mail' interface (oblivious to whether it's prod or dev environment) and you'd configure your DI framework to instantiate either the production or the development version of a mail implementation class. It's a bit cleaner in that you're not exposing and proliferating config parameter values.

There's certainly a learning curve there though, so it may not be viable at this stage of your project, but definitely something to keep in mind.

Answer 4

You can use web config inheritance of IIS to allow your app to 'inherit' global context settings from the respective environment into which it is deployed.

In a parent directory of where your .NET app is installed (e.g. /inetpub/wwwroot.web.config, or even the root web.config ( \Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\ver\web.config), add your environment specific settings, e.g.

In PROD

  <appSettings>
    <add key="sendMailTo" value="" />
    <add key="environmentName" value="PROD" />
  </appSettings>

In DEV

  <appSettings>
    <add key="sendMailTo" value="me@mydomain.com" />
    <add key="environmentName" value="DEV" />
  </appSettings>

These environment context settings aren't deployed everytime you redeploy your app. Also, all other apps you deploy to your servers can also inherit these settings.

Answer 5

Instead of changing your code, why don't you set your development mail server to only mail to you regardless of the TO address field?

Seems better than writing code to do that.