Focus Lab LLC’s EE Master Config

The purpose of this repository is to share our quick multi-environment setup for ExpressionEngine 2. We use this on every EE project to quickly and easily get support for multiple servers setup. This enables us to deploy any of our sites to any server with minimal changes or updates to any code or settings.

Introduction

At Focus Lab we work in multiple environments for every ExpressionEngine site we build. (For the sake of simplicity we’ll just define an environment as “any server running an instance of your site.”) In order for ExpressionEngine to support quick and easy deployments across environments, you need to use a robust config file. This is our approach to doing just that. A big strength in this approach is that we can ignore our local environment config file from Git. That way each local developer has their own config overrides that won’t affect the main repository.

The folder structure for a given project is the following:

/config
   - config.{env}.php
   - config.env.php
   - config.master.php
/public_html
/system

Where {env} is a shorthand hand for our environment. We typically have 4 environments. Production, Staging, Shared development & Local development. That in mind, our files are:

config.dev.php
config.env.php
config.local.php
config.master.php
config.prod.php
config.stage.php

Concept

There are three primary pieces to this structure. Environment declaration, master config values & environment-specific config values.

Environment Declaration

This file is the starting point of your environment setup. Based on the HTTP_HOST variable in PHP we define the environment (this may change if you’re using a load balance environment or EE’s MSM module). This is handled in the config.env.php file.

We approach the environment from the top down. We define all environments based on the domain and then set our default to “local” which allows our local developers to use whatever domain they choose (eg: mysite.dev, mysite.local, etc).

Three constants are defined in our environment declaration file. They are:

• ENV
• ENV_FULL
• ENV_DEBUG

ENV

This is the short-hand name of your environment. It needs to directly reflect the naming convention of your environment-specific file (seen below) such as config.local.php. This value is used as a conditional occasionally in the master config file.

ENV_FULL

This is the full name of your environment. There are no requirements on this value. We simply use it in our templates from time to time (“You are currently in the Staging environment”).

ENV_DEBUG

This is our boolean debug flag used frequently in our master config file. It allows us to keep debug settings “on” in specific environments. You can see how this is used in the master config file.

Master Config file

Our config.master.php file contains the bulk of the data for our setup. These are default configuration settings for our EE projects. Here we break up config settings into logical groups and add/remove as needed per project. In plain English, this is what the config.master.php document does/says:

If EE is looking for database credentials
	Load our environment-specific file (eg: config.prod.php)
	Define our DB cache directory
	Merge our expressionengine/config/database.php array with our environment-specific db array
	Unset our environment-specific array now that it's been used as needed
End if

If EE is looking for config array values
	Define our base paths (as inspired by Matt Weinberg)
	Define our template config settings
	Define our Debug settings
	Define our Performance-impacting settings
	Define any 3rd party settings
	Define any member-specific settings
	Define some final, miscellaneous settings
	Load our environment-specific config file (eg: config.prod.php)
	Setup some global variables for template use: {global:env} and {global:env_full}
	Merge our Global Variables arrays then our Config arrays
End if

Override Options

You can find a list of available configuration override options here on the EE Wiki page EE 2 Config Overrides. You can alternatively find individual setting array keys by “inspecting” elements within EE’s Control Panel and taking note of the input names. Third party developers may also include config override support in their add-ons.

Templates Settings

You can now change the location of your templates directory. Find $env_config['tmpl_file_basepath'] around line 132 in the config.master.php and change the value as needed.

Global Variables

You can define a set of template global variables in the config.master.php file as well. Around line 232 you will see that there are 2 variables available as an example. You can add anything here that you prefer, such as default date format strings etc.

Environment-Specific Config

The final piece to the equation is the environment-specific file. This file include the database credentials and any desired config overrides or global variables. This is the simplest and shortest of the three files.

There are three possible arrays to use here. They are $env_db, env_config and $env_global.

$env_db

This is just for your database credentials for the environment. What makes this convenient is that we ignore our config.local.php file from Git. That way each local developer has their own config overrides that won’t affect the main repository.

$env_db['hostname'] = '';
$env_db['username'] = '';
$env_db['password'] = '';
$env_db['database'] = '';

$env_config

This array allows you to override any config value from EE or from the master config file. This is useful for changing things that may be unique to a test environment. A good example would be the webmaster_email setting. If a single developer wants to receive all system emails to themselves when developing locally, they might use the following:

$env_config['webmaster_email'] = 'me@domain.com';

$env_global

This array is for defining global variables available within your EE templates. An example of how this can be used is the idea of using Google Analytics (GA) to track stats on your site. In the past we’ve used GA for tracking Staging and Production environments separately. Doing this was simple because we could define the GA key per-environment as needed.

$env_global['global:google_analytics'] = 'UA-XXXXXXX-XX';

This gives you variables like {global:google_analytics} in your EE templates.

Setup

• First, make sure you’re working in an pre-existing EE install (even if you just installed EE a few minutes ago). You can’t setup this config until after EE is installed.
• Copy the /config directory to the same directory level as your system directory (we recommend above web root)
• Modify config.env.php to reflect your environments and domains. You can remove and add environments as needed
• Update each config.{env}.php file with each environment’s database credentials as needed
• Create config overrides and global variables for each environment as needed
• Add the following code to the bottom of system/expressionengine/config/config.php (be sure not to delete other config settings already in this file):

/**
 * Require the Focus Lab, LLC Master Config file
 */
require $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/../config/config.master.php';


/* End of file config.php */
/* Location: ./system/expressionengine/config/config.php */

• Replace the contents of your system/expressionengine/config/database.php file with the contents in of the same file in this repository

Above webroot vs within webroot

The instructions above are for setting up the config above webroot (your “public_html”, “htdocs”, etc directory). This is recommended for security. However, if you’re unable to do this due to hosting restraints Alex Ball has written about the changes necessary to support this. You can read his step-by-step here.

MSM Support

MSM is a tricky one due to the variety of ways the server directory structure can be setup. We recommend keeping each site’s “public” directory siblings to one another, so the relative paths are all identical and accurate. Alternatively, you can define paths in each site’s index.php file as recommended in this gist: https://gist.github.com/d27570a3e52bdf656f54.

Contributions

If you’re interested in making this better please feel free to fork the code on GitHub and send pull requests. Also, we’d love to track any potential issues through the repository’s Issues tracker.

Support

We are happy to answer questions as needed and able, but there is no official support for using this config setup. Use it at your own risk with the understanding that our responses to any inquires will fall behind any commitments we may have at the time.

We are also available for private consultation if you would like assistance getting this setup for your EE site.

dev@focuslabllc.com

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