Question

My staging and production servers are on different servers and domains.

Which would be the best way to deal with external APIs that have a key that relies on domain names?
Is this bad practice and both should be on the same server?

Answer 1

Well, my own solution to this problem is using different keys in an array for different environments.

In this case i’ll try to explain it in PHP

class API_Client
{
    const ENV_STAGING = 'staging';
    const ENV_PRODUCTION = 'production';

    protected static $apiKeys = array(
        self::ENV_STAGING    => 'thisisthekeyformystagingenv',
        self::ENV_PRODUCTION => 'thisisthekeyformyproductionenv',
    );

    protected static $environment = self::ENV_PRODUCTION;

    public static function getEnvironment()
    {
         return self::$environment;
    }

    public static function setEnvironment($environment)
    {
         self::$environment = $environment;
    }

    public static function apiCall($call)
    {
         $environment = self::getEnvironment();
         if(array_key_exists(self::$apiKeys, $environment))
             $apiKey = self::$apiKeys[$environment];
         else throw new Exception("No API key found for current environment '$environment'");

         return self::_apiCall($apiKey, $call);
    }

    protected static function _apiCall($apiKey, $call)
    {
         // Make the call to the API
    }
}

I hope this helps…