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Configuration
The configuration repository is separately maintained at https://github.com/PhpGt/Config
Configuration files are used to store data that can change between environments, such as database connection details, API keys, timezone information, and so on. It is common practice to have different configuration values based on the environment where the application is running.
All configuration files for WebEngine applications are stored in the project's root directory as .ini
files, and a default config is supplied by WebEngine to set all config values to meaningful defaults.
Multiple config files can exist which introduce new config values or override existing values. All values can also be overridden by setting environment variables on the server.
The following order is used to override configuration values:
- The WebEngine default config:
/vendor/phpgt/webengine/config.default.ini
- The project's default config:
config.ini
- Development config:
config.dev.ini
- Deployment config:
config.deploy.ini
- Production config:
config.prod.ini
- Environment variables
The ini file format that WebEngine uses is the default format understood by PHP's parse_ini_file
function. All ini files should be split into sections using square bracket notation.
An example config.ini
:
[app]
namespace=SuperCoolApp
[database]
host=db.example.com
username=dbuser
password=dbpass
[example-api]
key=aabbccddeeff
secret="a long passphrase"
Then, for example, on the production server we can change the database.host
and example-api.key
values.
An example overriding config.prod.ini
:
[database]
host=live-db.example.com
[example-api]
key=gghhiijjkkll
Only the keys that need to be overridden on the production environment need to be present in the config.prod.ini
file. All other keys will be inherited.
Throughout WebEngine, global variables are not permitted. Config values can usually be seen as global state, meaning that they can be read from anywhere in your code (or your code's dependencies). Rather than passing around important API keys and database passwords to every class in the application, a single instance of the Config
class is passed to your Page Logic entrypoint, allowing you to decide which classes of the application get passed the configuration, and which sections of the configuration they have access to.
From within a Logic class, $this->config
is set to an instance of the Config
object. The config object has two mechanisms for retrieving config data: get
and getSection
. Both functions retrieve the pre-parsed and overridden values.
The get
method allows the use of dot-notation to grab the value of some config by name. For example, to obtain the password
value from the [database]
section of the above example file:
$this->config->get("database.password");
Sometimes areas of your application may need to load many configuration variables, which would make it difficult to pass around each variable individually.
The getSection
function promotes proper encapsulation throughout your application, as it allows you to pass whole config sections individually to the areas of code that need to consume them.
Using this method allows an area of the code to be handed the passwords and secrets that it needs to know about, without being handed all other database and api passwords, for example.
The getSection
function returns a ConfigSection
object, which implements the Iterator
interface and exposes the get
method.
Iterating over the returned ConfigSection
object allows you to act on each key and value in the section:
foreach($config->getSection("database") as $key => $value) {
// ...
}
To simply get a single value from within the section, pass its key to the get
method:
$databasePassword = $dbConfigSection->get("password");
As an alternative to overriding config keys in separate ini files, keys can be set as environment variables on the system. This can be done in the server configuration file or exported during system boot process.
Important note: environment variables cannot contain periods, so database.password
must be replaced by database_password
. As all environment variables must be stored within ini sections, the text before the first underscore is always treated as the section name.
If you choose to use environment variables, the best place to set them is in the server's configuration file.
Example of setting database.password
variable on nginx - nginx.conf
:
location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_param database_password super-secret-passw0rd;
include fastcgi_params;
}
As part of your deployment process, you may want to set configuration variables depending on the build pipeline. A common use case is to set an environment variable according to the current branch being deployed.
To achieve this kind of dynamic configuration, it is possible to generate ini files by calling the config-generate
script which takes two or more arguments:
- The suffix; either "dev", "deploy" or "prod"
- Each individual config key-value pair, wrapped in quotes
For example, to create a config.prod.ini
file that overrides the database host and example-api key, run the following command:
vendor/bin/config-generate prod "database.host=live-db.example.com" "example-api.key=gghhiijjkkll"
When PHP.Gt/Config parses the ini file, it uses the INI_SCANNER_TYPED
scanner mode, allowing for boolean, integer and null values to be preserved.
String values "true", "on" and "yes" are converted to TRUE. "false", "off", "no" and "none" are considered FALSE. "null" is converted to NULL in typed mode. Also, all numeric strings are converted to integer type if it is possible.
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