Safety Net

for Team51 Development Sites

Download the latest release

What's this?

This is a WordPress plugin developed by WordPress.com Special Projects (Team 51) that secures sensitive data on development, staging, and local sites. It deletes users and WooCommerce orders and subscriptions, as well as prevents sites from acting on user data (e.g. sending emails, processing renewals, etc.)

Disclaimer

This public plugin is provided as an example of how such a plugin could be implemented, and is provided without any support or guarantees. Please use at your own discretion. Incorrect usage could result in data deletion.

Existing Features

• Stop Emails: When Safety Net is activated, WordPress will be blocked from sending emails. (Caution: may not block SMTP or other plugins from doing so).
• Pause Renewal Actions: When Safety Net is activated, Action Scheduler will not claim renewal actions or payment retry actions from WooCommerce Subscriptions, effectively pausing them. Other scheduled actions will continue to run. This is toggleable in wp-admin.
• Discourage Search Engines: Sets the "Discourage search engines" option and disallows all user agents in the robots.txt file. Also disables Jetpack 'publicize' option.
• Scrub Options: Clears specific denylisted options, such as API keys, which could cause problems on a development site.
• Deactivate Plugins: Deactivates denylisted plugins. Also, runs through installed Woo payment gateways and deactivates them as well (deactivates the actual plugin, not from the checkout settings).
• Delete: Deletes all non-admin users, WooCommerce orders and subscriptions.

Advanced features

• CLI commands: CLI equivalents of the above features: wp safety-net scrub-options, wp safety-net deactivate-plugins, and wp safety-net delete

Skipping GiveWP Data Deletion

By default, Safety Net will delete GiveWP donor data, payment records, and subscriptions when running the data deletion process. If you want to preserve GiveWP data on a staging site, you can define the following constant in your wp-config.php file:

define( 'SAFETY_NET_SKIP_GIVEWP', true );

When this constant is set to true, all GiveWP-specific data will be excluded from the deletion process. This includes donor records, donation posts, subscription data, and related metadata.

Planned Features

• Multi-site (WordPress network) compatibility
• Do you have a suggestion for the next great feature to add? Please create an issue or submit a PR!

How to use?

Download the plugin code directly from this repo.

Activating the plugin on a non-production site will:

1. Scrub denylisted options.*
2. Deactivate denylisted plugins.*
3. Delete users, orders, and subscriptions.*
4. Stop emails. You can still test and view emails by activating the WP Mail Logging plugin.
5. Pause Renewal Actions.
6. Discourage search engines.

*Only runs automatically if wp_get_environment_type returns staging, development, or local. If you have access to WP-CLI, you can SSH in and run wp config set WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE staging --type=constant

How to add plugins or options to the denylists

These denylists are txt files that live in the assets/data/ folder. Each plugin or option is on its own line.

You may also:

• Create a new issue or dev request to have a plugin or option added to the denylists, or
• Submit a PR to add something yourself, and let us know so we can merge it

Blocking Use in Production

Safety Net will not run on production sites. It will check the WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE global system variable, or a constant of the same name. If it is set to production, the plugin will not run. You can manually trigger this using the safety_net_show_production_notice filter (just pass back false to disable safety net).

add_filter( 'safety_net_show_production_notice', '__return_false' );

Adding plugins to the Deny list.

You can add a plugin to the deny list for a single site using the following filter.

add_filter( 'safety_net_denylisted_plugins', function( $denylist ) {
    // Add the full path to the plugin file here you wish to deny.
    $denylist[] = 'plugin-folder/plugin-file.php';

    // You can use partial names as well.
    $denylist[] = 'paypal'; // this would match any plugin with 'paypal' in the name.
    return $denylist;
} );

Troubleshooting

Plugin not running

For Safety Net to run - and to access the tools page - the environment type needs to be set as staging, development, or local. The type can be set via the WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE global system variable, or a constant of the same name.

One way to do that is to edit your wp-config.php file, and add define('WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE', 'development');

Or, if you have access to WP-CLI, you can SSH in and run wp config set WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE staging --type=constant

If your site is on Pressable, you can also achieve this by setting the site as a Staging Site.

Plugin won't activate

It's possible that there is another copy of the plugin active on the site. Check in the mu-plugins folder.

I don't want the functions to automatically run on my non-production site

You'll need to go into the includes/bootstrap.php file and comment out whichever of these 3 functions you don't want to run:

add_action( 'safety_net_loaded', __NAMESPACE__ . '\maybe_scrub_options' );
add_action( 'safety_net_loaded', __NAMESPACE__ . '\maybe_deactivate_plugins' );
add_action( 'safety_net_loaded', __NAMESPACE__ . '\maybe_delete_data' )

Explanations

BuddyPress

• Deletes user profiles, friends, messages, and notifications.

Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

• Scrubs the API access settings.
• Disables the plugin.

PMPro

• Scrubs all database keys containing API keys for payment gateways.
• Deletes user meta related to PMPro billing, like the billing address or Stripe customer ID.
• Deletes all database entries related to membership orders & subscriptions, including coupon usage.
• Disables all cron jobs related to PMPro.

Publish to Apple News

• Scrubs the API access settings.
• Disables API sync on WP post status updates.
• Disables the outgoing debugging email.