Log Out all Users After Pushing a Staging Site to Production

When you’re managing a WordPress website with a staging environment, pushing changes to production is a critical process. It ensures your live website stays consistent and functional. However, during this process, active user sessions from the staging site can persist into the production environment, which may pose security risks or lead to unexpected behavior like users seeing the old and outdated content.

To address this, and you want to make sure that all users will see the updated website you can log out all users automatically after pushing your staging site to production using a custom WordPress filter. This ensures that any session data from the staging site is invalidated and users are required to log in again. Here’s how you can implement this solution with WP Staging.

The Problem: Session Persistence

When you push a staging site to production, user session data, including login tokens, is also transferred. As a result:

• Users from the staging site may remain logged in on the production site.
• Sensitive data could inadvertently remain accessible.
• Security risks may arise due to token misuse.

The Solution: Use a Custom Filter to Invalidate User Sessions

By leveraging the wpstg_pushing_complete action provided by WP Staging, you can trigger a function to invalidate all active user sessions immediately after a push. This is achieved by deleting session tokens stored in the WordPress database.

Code Implementation

Here’s the code snippet to log out all users after pushing your staging site to production:

/**
 * Log out all users after pushing a staging site to production.
 */
function myPrefixinvalidateAllUsers()
{
    // Access the global $wpdb object to interact with the database
    global $wpdb;

    // Cleanup session tokens from the usermeta table
    $wpdb->query("DELETE FROM {$wpdb->prefix}usermeta WHERE meta_key = 'session_tokens'");
}

// Hook the function to WP Staging's 'wpstg_pushing_complete' action
add_action('wpstg_pushing_complete', 'myPrefixinvalidateAllUsers');

How It Works

1. Database Cleanup:
   The function myPrefixinvalidateAllUsers() interacts with WordPress’s usermeta table to remove all records associated with the session_tokens meta key. This effectively invalidates all active user sessions.
2. Triggering the Action:
   The wpstg_pushing_complete hook is fired when WP Staging completes the process of pushing a staging site to production. The function is executed automatically at this stage.
3. Result:
   Once the session tokens are removed, all users are logged out and must log in again to access the production site.

Steps to Implement

1. Create a Must-Use Plugin (MU-Plugin):
   • Navigate to your production site’s wp-content/mu-plugins/ directory. If the directory doesn’t exist, create it.
   • Create a new PHP file, such as invalidate-user-sessions.php.
   • Copy and paste the code snippet above into this file.
2. Deploy:
   • Save the file and ensure it’s uploaded to the mu-plugins directory.
   • WP Staging will now automatically log out all users after every push to production.

Benefits

• Improved Security: Users from the staging environment cannot inadvertently access the live site.
• Enhanced Control: Ensures only verified users can log in again post-deployment.
• Streamlined Management: Automates session management during the deployment process.

Additional Notes

• This solution applies only to WP Staging’s push-to-production feature. It doesn’t affect other WordPress functionalities or sessions created afterward.
• For multisite setups, ensure the script runs on all subsites as necessary.

With this approach, you can maintain a secure and reliable production environment, ensuring a smooth transition from staging to live.