How can I set up ElasticPress on my Staging / Development Environment Sites?

All of our ElasticPress.io plans support development / staging environments. There is no special setup required—just use the same credentials as you use for your production site and follow the same steps outlined in our Getting Started page.

ElasticPress will create an index for each site based on the site’s complete base site URL (this is set in your WordPress Admin menu > Settings > General). For example, if your production site is www.website.com and you have a staging site at staging.website.com, ElasticPress will create an index named wwwwebsitecom for production and an index named stagingwebsitecom for your staging site.

The only time this might cause any issues is if you have multiple development environments that share the same name. (This most often happens with local development instances.) In the event that multiple sites are in use with the exact same URL, those environments will share an index and the results may be unpredictable. In this case, we recommend creating a prefix for your index, either by naming your local URLs with a unique identifier like the developer’s name, or by filtering the index name using the ep_index_name filter.