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This happened in the early days of GitHub:

https://github.blog/2010-11-15-today-s-outage/

These sloppy setups are common even today, where it's fairly easy to allow for a simple config error or a wrong environment variable (env=PROD) to wipe out production from a test suite. These safeguards need to be in place in the first days of your codebase.

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Oh I was under the impression that it was a forgotten reverse ssh tunnel, that proxied localhost:some_port to the production setup.

Or maybe that was another story hehe.

can you an example of those kinds of safeguards? asking for a friend :)

I think one thing is to make sure that when your test suite executes - you should force environment to "TEST" programmatically, before any bootstrapping code even runs.

So even if you allow for connection to production (sometimes that's allowed for debugging hard-to-reproduce issues), you want to remove any room for human error.

And your code should obviously NEVER be able to connect to anything other than the local test DB when your environment is set to "TEST".

Not letting devs access production :)

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