This paper studies an infinite-server queue in a random environment, meaning that the arrival rate, the service requirements, and the server work rate are modulated by a general càdlàg stochastic background process. To prove a large deviations principle, the concept of attainable parameters is introduced. Scaling both the arrival rates and the background process, a large deviations principle for the number of jobs in the system is derived using attainable parameters. Finally, some known results about Markov-modulated infinite-server queues are generalized and new results for several background processes and scalings are established in examples.