PHP Defcon Extension

PHP Defcon is an PHP extension to add constants at start time of the engine for the entire runtime. Normally, you would suppose to add config constants to your PHP Script for every request like this:

define('DB_USER', 'root');
define('DB_PASS', 'MyS3cR37PW!');
define('DB_NAME', 'test');

define('F_IS_FRIEND', 1);
define('F_IS_FOF', 2);

A Better alternative would be using Defcon. An Example config file could look like this:

# Database Config
string DB_HOST = "localhost";
string DB_USER = "root";
string DB_PASS = "yS3cR37PW!";
string DB_NAME = "test";

# Store the eth0 IP into a constant using the backtick operator
string HOST_IP = `ifconfig eth0 | sed -n 's/ *inet addr:\([0-9.]\+\).*/\1/p'`

# Parsertest
int T1 = 123;
int T2 = 1.3;
int T3 = "test";
real T4 = 1;
int @T3 = "toast";

string T5 = hello # should work too

logical T6 = true;
logical T7 = false;
logical T8 = 234;

require '/var/admin/defcon.global.conf'

Config File Reading

The require and include keywords can be used to include an additional file from a given config file. include ignores errors, while require stops the defcon configuration process on error. NOTE put single or double quotes around the pathnames, unless they do not contain a dot '.' character.

To change the config file from the default /etc/defcon.conf, add to php.ini:

defcon.config-file = "/some/where/else.conf"

If the config file given, either in php.ini or in a require/include statement, really happens to be a directory, all files from that directory with names ending in .conf will be read, in sorted order. If any of these names is again a directory, that other directory will be read, recursively.

Type keywords

Constant definitions are typed, and always must start with a type keyword. The following types are recognized:

• string defines an arbitrary string constant
• int with synonym long and short
• double with synonyms real and float
• bool with synonyms boolean and logical

The type keyword must always be followed by one or more constant definitions, each comprised of a constant name, an equal '=' sign, and a value.

Multiple such constant definitions of the same type, may be separated using a comma ',' operator, without repeating the type keyword - like this:

string OneString = "aaa" , AnotherString = "bbb"

Constant Name Syntax

Constant names must start with a letter (A-Z or a-z) or underscore. From the second place on, digits are also permitted.

Constant names can be 64 characters long, at maximum.

The constant names are defined to be case sensitive.

If the constant name specification starts with the special '@' sign, and the constant is already defined at that point, the usual Notice about duplicate definition, is suppressed.

Constant Value Syntax

You can write the constant values, after the '=' sign, either surrounded by quotes, or without any quotes.

If you write values without any quotes, the value will end as soon as some syntactically relevant character is encountered, like whitespace, newline, comma, semicolon, and sometimes a dot. Furthermore if such an unquoted value happens to be the name of an already defined constant, the value of that constant is substituted in its place.

Quoted strings work almost like in PHP itself:

• Single quoted strings permit backslash escapes for embedding a single quote, or a backslash itself; all other backslashes are left alone.
• Double quoted strings permit the full set of backslash escapes. However, no effort is made to implement Dollar (Variable) substitution!
• Backtick quoted strings first interpret the content like double quoted strings, wrt. backslash escapes, and then run the result as a shell command, substituting the command output.

For string constants, as well as the pathes of require and include statements, you can additionally use the dot '.' character to concatenate multiple strings together. This is especially useful together with the aforementioned replacement of unquoted values that happen to be known constants, like in the following example:

string PREFIX = "/usr/local"
string BIN = PREFIX . "/bin"

NOTE: for any single constant assignment, the overall length of the value is restricted to a compile time constant, 4096 byte. This is usually warned about when it happens, except for backtick command substitution, where the command output is silently truncated.

Installation

• Download defcon source package
• Unpack defcon source package
• Go to defcon folder and type "phpize && ./configure && make"
• Maybe run the included test cases: make test PHP_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/php5 TEST_PHP_ARGS="-q"
• If all is well, run "make install", as root, to copy modules/defcon.so to your PHP extension directory.
• Make sure you have extension=defcon.so in your php.ini, or in a file like /etc/php5/conf.d/defcon.ini
• Add configuration to your /etc/defcon.conf, or to whatever file you configured using the defcon.config-file= php.ini setting.