Let's list preferences that should not be the same. This is useful if you copy a site from development to production. They could be part of environment variables. You can set via System Configuration.

Likely different

  • db/local.php (unless on different servers)
  • unified_elastic_index_prefix (if both point to the same Elasticsearch instance or cluster)
  • memcache_prefix
  • tiki_cdn
  • Authentication method: If you are connection to Active Directory or LDAP in production, you may want to change this setting in development
  • cookie_name (unless on different domain)
  • domain redirect
  • scheduler_delay introduced in Tiki23 to allow delaying all scheduled tasks to run some minutes after it was supposed to. It's useful for cloned instances, avoiding all schedulers to run at the same time. See Scheduler. Related commit: https://sourceforge.net/p/tikiwiki/code/77631
  • metatag_robots: You may want "noindex, nofollow" for non-production sites
  • zend_mail_handler = "file" to avoid the test upgrade to send email and confuse end users. Instead, emails are saved to a file
  • tmpDir needs to be set to a writable directory. A clone may require a different path.

May be different

  • New in Tiki22: Catch all email so you can test everything without spamming users
  • .htaccess setting; You may not have full control over the servers (Apache modules, etc).
    Also: If Tiki is not in the root web directory, you usually have to set the Apache RewriteBase in htaccess. This could different between your environments.
  • Security & Performance setting; The production domain and website may use different security setting than the development website (SSL certificate). Same goes for performance setting that are usually OFF while developing and should be enable and tuned on prod.


See also here: https://tiki.org/Pre-Dogfood+Server#System_Configuration

Also to be careful about: If you are storing files on disk and dev / staging / prod are on the same server (ex: with sub-domains): You should make sure they are pointing to different directories (otherwise, you delete a file on the dev server, and it deletes it on the production server, because the storage is shared). See ideal scenario for file storage

Pref name Path of storage for feature (if stored in directory)
w_use_dir Wiki page attachments
fgal_use_dir File Gallery
t_use_dir Tracker attachments
In each forum Forums


See also: