I've added a similar safety to every project. It's not perfect, but this last line of defense has saved team members from themselves more than once.
For Django projects, add the below to manage.py:
env_name = os.environ.get("ENVIRONMENT", "ENVIRONMENT_NOT_SET")
if env_name in TEST_PROTECTED_ENVIRONMENTS and "test" in sys.argv:
raise Exception(f"You cannot run tests with ENVIRONMENT={env_name}")
I think runtime checks like this using environment variables is great however what has burned me in the past is that when debugging problems, not knowing what happened at runtime when the logs were produced was problematic. So when test protected environments environment variable needed to be updated I might have a hard time back tracking to it
For Django projects, add the below to manage.py: