one silly last resort measure I did on a project a while back was having a IS_STAGING file somewhere, only existing on localhost, and every request it would che

one silly last resort measure I did on a project a while back was having a IS_STAGING file somewhere, only existing on localhost, and every request it would check if the hostname is that of the live site, and if so, delete that file. the file itself wasn't enough to make the server think it's in staging mode, but it was the only thing in the chain that if it were to go wrong, would fix itself automatically almost immediately (and log an error)