It is much simpler to do it as in your example, but I just somehow got stuck on playing with environment variables and needlessly complicated rewrite rules.

In two more recent projects I do it very much like you advertise.

Thanks for your comment.

if ( $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] == '127.0.0.1' ) {
	define('WP_HOME','http://example.local');
	define('WP_SITEURL','http://example.local');
} else {
	define('WP_HOME','http://example.com');
	define('WP_SITEURL','http://example.com');
}

Instead of setting the environment variable through apache though?

ANyways, thanks for the writeup.