A sample CakePHP application that will load configuration information based on an environment flag value.
It is meant to accompany this presentation: Running a CakePHP App in Different Operating Environments
The Cake 3 demo app lives in app-cake3/.
A web app most likely has to connect to a different database when being developed on a developer's workstation or virtual machine compared to the production server(s). This repo demonstrates how to set up a CakePHP project to load different configuration values based on a value unique to each operating environment, such as an environment variable.
In Apache, this can be accomplished using SetEnv:
# my_apache_vhost.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName stagingsite.com
SetEnv APP_ENV staging
</VirtualHost>On the command line you can export an environment variable (for use with Cake Shells):
# ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile
export APP_ENV=stagingWith Cake 3, you can load additional configuration files quickly in config/bootstrap.php:
// config/bootstrap.php
// After loading the stock config file,
// load the environment config file
// and the local config file (when present.)
try {
$env = getenv('APP_ENV');
Configure::load("app-{$env}", 'default');
} catch (\Exception $e) {
// It is not an error if this file is missing.
}
try {
Configure::load('app-local', 'default');
} catch (\Exception $e) {
// It is not an error if this file is missing.
}The additional code above will load values from the file config/app-staging.php.
Assuming the config files contained the following:
// config/app.php
return [
'debug' => false,
'App' => [
'FancyName' => 'Wonderful Application',
'EnvSignalColor' => '#ffffff', // White admin background in production.
],
];// config/app-stage.php
return [
'debug' => true, // Turn debug on in the staging environment.
'App' => [
// (Note that we don't change the [FancyName] key.)
'EnvSignalColor' => '#77cccc', // Red admin background in staging.
],
];In your app, you can access a consistently named key and obtain a value appropriate for the current environment. Take src/Template/Layout/default.ctp for example:
<!-- src/Template/Layout/default.ctp -->
<head>
<style>
.navBackgroundColor {
background-color: <?php echo Configure::read('App.EnvSignalColor'); ?>;
}
</style>
</head>That's a much better alternative than this:
<!-- src/Template/Layout/default.ctp -->
<?php if ($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] === 'productionsite.com') {
$bgColor = '#ffffff'; // white in production
} elseif ($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] === 'stagingsite.com') {
$bgColor = '#cccc77'; // yellow in staging
} else {
$bgColor = '#77cccc'; // red in development
} ?>
<head>
<style>
.navBackgroundColor {
background-color: <?php echo $bgColor; ?>;
}
</style>
</head>This same principle can be applied to Cake 2.x and 1.x apps, although there are some things to keep in mind.
- Where Cake 3 unifies all configurations into a single file,
config/app.php. Cakes 1 & 2 uses multiple config files such asConfig/database.php,Config/email.phpandConfig/core.php. This repo has anapp-cake2/folder that demonstrates how to adapt the Email and Database configurations to load fromConfigure, making them automatically "environment-aware" and bringing them in-line with Cake 3. Configure::load()behaves very differently in Cake 1. It will overwrite keys wholesale, whereas Cakes 2 and 3 will merge keys deeply usingHash::merge(). This can have unexpected results in both cases.
There is a Cake 2.x demo app available that demonstrates the necessary changes.
This is GitHub: Feel free to open an issue.
Brian Porter, 2015
Code released under the MIT license.