config

In this post I will present a configuration file loader I wrote in PHP. The purpose of this package is to make working with different kinds of configuration files easy and intuitive. Currently supported file types are PHP and JSON, but the package is easily extandable to satisfy special requirements. The API is sleek and simple and the package itself comes without any dependencies.

• Requirements
• Install
• Usage
  • Instantiate basic configuration
  • Instantiate configuration using custom parser
  • Using “dot” notation
• Testing
• Addition
• Conclusion

Requirements

This package requires PHP 7.1 or higher.

Install

Via composer

$ composer require rkulik/config

Usage

In the following section I provide you some examples for different scenarios. These examples use PHP for their configurations.

• Instantiate basic configuration
• Instantiate configuration using custom parser
• Using “dot” notation

Instantiate basic configuration

This is the basic workflow for using the config package. First you create a configuration file which returns an array:

<?php
// config.php

return [
    'hello' => 'world',
];

After that you instantiate the configuration factory and create a config object based on the configuration file. This config object is able to perform CRUD operations on the configuration:

<?php
// index.php

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

$configFactory = new \Rkulik\Config\ConfigFactory();

$config = $configFactory->make('config.php');

echo $config->get('hello'); // world

Instantiate configuration using custom parser

For special requirements, such as working with unsupported types of configuration files, using a custom parser is the suggested way to go. In this example we create a custom parser to retrieve reversed configuration values:

<?php
// config.php

return [
    'hello' => 'world',
];

<?php
// CustomParser.php

use Rkulik\Config\FileParser\FileParserInterface;

class CustomParser implements FileParserInterface
{
    /**
     * {@inheritdoc}
     */
    public function parse(string $file): array
    {
        $data = require $file;
        
        array_walk($data, function (&$item) {
            $item = strrev($item);
        });

        return $data;
    }
}

The parser gets passed in while creating the config object:

<?php
// index.php

require 'vendor/autoload.php';
require 'CustomParser.php';

$configFactory = new \Rkulik\Config\ConfigFactory();
$customParser = new CustomParser();

$config = $configFactory->make('config.php', $customParser);

echo $config->get('hello'); // dlrow

Using “dot” notation

You can use “dot” notation to specify configuration hierarchies:

<?php
// config.php

return [
    'hello' => [
        'beautiful' => 'world',
    ],
];

<?php
// index.php

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

$configFactory = new \Rkulik\Config\ConfigFactory();

$config = $configFactory->make('config.php');

echo $config->get('hello.beautiful'); // world

Testing

As you might already know from one of my previous posts, testing is very important to me. That’s why this package has a 100% code coverage.

You can run the tests using following:

$ composer test

Addition

This package works great in combination with dotfiles. By using a package like phpdotenv, you can inject environment variables into the configuration file.

<?php
// config.php

return [
    'hello' => getenv('WORLD'),
];

Conclusion

Lightweight configuration file loader which makes working with configuration files a pleasure. The package can be found on GitHub.