Introduction

Zend\Config is designed to simplify access to configuration data within applications. It provides a nested object property-based user interface for accessing this configuration data within application code. The configuration data may come from a variety of media supporting hierarchical data storage. Currently, Zend\Config provides adapters that read and write configuration data stored in .ini, JSON, YAML and XML files.

Using Zend\Config\Config with a Reader Class

Normally, it is expected that users would use one of the reader classes to read a configuration file, but if configuration data are available in a PHP array, one may simply pass the data to Zend\Config\Config‘s constructor in order to utilize a simple object-oriented interface:

// An array of configuration data is given
$configArray = array(
    'webhost'  => 'www.example.com',
    'database' => array(
        'adapter' => 'pdo_mysql',
        'params'  => array(
            'host'     => 'db.example.com',
            'username' => 'dbuser',
            'password' => 'secret',
            'dbname'   => 'mydatabase'
        )
    )
);

// Create the object-oriented wrapper using the configuration data
$config = new Zend\Config\Config($configArray);

// Print a configuration datum (results in 'www.example.com')
echo $config->webhost;

As illustrated in the example above, Zend\Config\Config provides nested object property syntax to access configuration data passed to its constructor.

Along with the object oriented access to the data values, Zend\Config\Config also has get() method that returns the supplied value if the data element doesn’t exist in the configuration array. For example:

$host = $config->database->get('host', 'localhost');

Using Zend\Config\Config with a PHP Configuration File

It is often desirable to use a purely PHP-based configuration file. The following code illustrates how easily this can be accomplished:

// config.php
return array(
    'webhost'  => 'www.example.com',
    'database' => array(
        'adapter' => 'pdo_mysql',
        'params'  => array(
            'host'     => 'db.example.com',
            'username' => 'dbuser',
            'password' => 'secret',
            'dbname'   => 'mydatabase'
        )
    )
);

// Consumes the configuration array
$config = new Zend\Config\Config(include 'config.php');

// Print a configuration datum (results in 'www.example.com')
echo $config->webhost;