PHP Configuration files
When ever you build a decent size application you will probably need to save configuration values. While you can
hardcode configuration values this can make your code more brittle as you will have to update these configuration
changes everywhere they are hardcoded when you want to update the value. Which could be quite a pain if this is stored
in 10+ files!
The easiest way to get around this is by using PHP's built in configuration capacity.
To do this create your own configuration file, in this case its called config.ini.
DatabaseName = "phprocks"
Hostname = "localhost"
Username = "test"
Password = "password123"
This can then be read with the
parse_ini_file function, like so:
$config = parse_ini_file("config.ini");
//will output phprocks
echo $config['DatabaseName'];
If you have a lot of configuration values this can be split down into sections so the config file would be modified to be:
[Database]
DatabaseName = "phprocks"
Hostname = "localhost"
Username = "test"
Password = "password123"
[Site]
SiteTitle = "PHP Rocks! - "
So to use the configuration file with sections you need to specify an extra parameter in the parse_ini_file function as
shown below.
$config = parse_ini_file("config.ini", true);
//will output phprocks
echo $config['Database']['DatabaseName'];
This returns a multidimensional array which is why you must first specify the section you want so in the example
above
Database before the configuration element
DatabaseName
Comments to date: 1. Page 1 of 1. Average Rating:

Waleed 8:46pm on Thursday, April 14th, 2011 
Simply Amazing. After going through so many tutorial, this configuration thing is useful and new to me..
PHP-Rocks..You Rocks.
Written by Dominic Skinner
Last Updated: 2011-10-25 16:00:38