Production-friendly Configuration Files in PHP

When developing a PHP apps, we often need to keep some configurations saved in constants. In that way, we can access it anywhere in our application.

But, the problem is that we need to have different configurations for development and production (+ may be testing). Here's a simple trick that you can use to do it effectively.

You will need 3 files (Normally I save include files in the /inc directory).

• inc/config.php - This is the file you are going to include
• inc/config.server.php - Production configurations
• inc/config.dev.php - Development configurations
• inc/config.default.php (Optional) - Default configurations (Common for both production and development)

In config.php, first we include the correct config file according to the server name. Make sure you replace the domains with your production and development domains in the following code. Then, we can include the default configurations file.

config.php

<?php
if ($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] === 'production.com') {
    include_once 'config.server.php';
} else if ($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] === 'localdomain.com') {
    include_once 'config.dev.php';
}

include_once 'config.default.php';

Each config file can contain code as following.

// database config
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
define('DB_USERNAME', 'root'); 
// ...

// domain config
define('PROTOCOL', 'https://');
// ...

// and any thing

The default config file can contain configurations which are common to both production and development.

define('MAX_USERNAME_LENGTH', 15);

// etc.

Now, in any other PHP file where you need configurations to be included, you can just include the config.php file.

<?php
include_once '/path/to/config.php';

You are done!

You may already have used this technique previously. But, if you haven't I'm happy you learned something new. I think this is the best way to save configs as there's no need to rename files in production server each time you upload, which makes no sense. (I have seen some people do that)

:)