Prod Guard is a Mozilla Firefox Plugin that alerts and cautions you when you access Production Websites. This is done by way of adding pre-configured warning signs to the URLs of those websites.
Production websites are Live Sites as opposed to a development or a staging site where people are just trying to set it up or attempting improvements. You must be careful while working with them lest you make some inadvertent mistakes assuming that they are under development, leading to serious consequences in terms of money and efforts.
Prod Guard is especially handy for people who need to constantly shuttle between a production and development environment. Often people have a tendency to forget the environment that they are working on and accidentally end up making changes in production sites that prove to be costly.
Prod Guard lets you add bright red warnings to all those websites that are under production. Once this is done, the warning keeps reminding you that you are working in a production environment and need to be extremely vigilant.
Prod Guard allows 3 styles (locations) for the warning viz, top banner, bottom banner, or border. You can also type a message along with the warning and configure the background and foreground colors.
Here are the steps that you should follow:
1. Download and install the Firefox plugin from the link provided at the end of this article.
2. Click on the Prod Guard plugin icon and then click on ‘New Warning’
3. Enter the URL of the Production Website, type a warning message and customize the style and colors of the background and text. Click save when you are done.
4. For each production website, you must add a separate Warning.
5. The next time, you navigate to the specified URL, the Warning will be given based on the settings that you have specified.
6. You can also use wild card characters in the URL expression. If you specify the URL as www.xyz.com/* then a warning will be displayed each time you access this domain followed by any path like for example www.xyz.com/admin, www.xyz.com/cpanel etc. These wild card characters can be used at any place in the fully qualified domain name including host, path or even port.
Verdict:
Prod Guard is a good and handy tool to prevent people from committing serious mistakes in a production environment assuming that they are working on a development website. The colored warnings and message keep reminding them of the same.
Use Mozilla Firefox to read this article and click here to download and install the Prod Guard plugin.
