Development websites and GravityKit licenses

Activate your GravityKit license on your staging and development sites too, so they get the same product updates as your live site. GravityKit doesn’t count a site toward your license’s site limit when its address looks like a development address.

Addresses that don’t count toward your site limit #

A site counts as a development site when its address matches one of these:

• A domain ending in .local, .test, or .localhost, such as mysite.local.
• localhost, a private or loopback IP address such as 192.168.1.20 or 127.0.0.1, or a computer name with no dot, such as http://devbox:8080.
• A subdomain that contains dev, test, stage, staging, or local, such as dev.example.com, staging.example.com, or shop-test.example.com.
• A hosting company’s staging or temporary domain, such as .wpengine.com, .kinsta.cloud, .pantheonsite.io, .cloudwaysapps.com, .flywheelsites.com, .wpcomstaging.com, or *.instawp.xyz.

Addresses that count as live sites #

GravityKit treats every other address as a live site, even when the site is a copy you only use for testing. The words dev, test, stage, staging, and local only make a difference in a subdomain, so devsite.com and testing-shop.com are live sites. So is mysite.dev, because .dev is a public domain ending.

If your staging site’s address isn’t recognized, contact support with the address, and we’ll raise your license’s activation limit so you can use the license on both sites.

Activating a license on localhost #

WordPress treats every site as a production site unless its configuration says otherwise. On a production site whose address is localhost, such as http://localhost:8888, GravityKit stops the activation on the Manage Your Kit page with this message: “This site currently reports its address as http://localhost:8888. Set WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL to your domain, then activate again, or contact support if this address is correct.”

To activate the license, mark the site as a local one. Add this line to wp-config.php, above the line that says That's all, stop editing!, then activate the key again:

define( 'WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE', 'local' );

define( 'WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE', 'local' );

Activating with WP-CLI works without this change.

Checking which sites count #

On the Licenses page of your GravityKit account, a license that is active on a live site shows a Live Sites count, such as 1 / 3. Development sites appear in the license’s list of sites, but they aren’t part of that count.