Global Constants with PHP
There are certainly many possibilities to create a global config-file for your web project. You could create a global configuration file for your defines, which you have to include in every file. Better is an automatic include by the auto_prepend_file directive in your php.ini.
The problem here is the word "include". For every include you need hard drive access and have the parse- and cast-overhead for the directives. Someone could say that you could install an op-cache and the problem is cleared. Okay thats quite right. Some good op-code caches do also mmap variables and constants. But not in every case an op-cache is appropriate. Consequently it's difficult to have constants available everytime and above all global.
For this problem I wrote the PHP-Extension defcon - define constant. defcon is able to define constants in a seperate config file, which is available after server startup. In addition it's a nice spin-off that you have no parsing and execution overhead; everything is held in memory like core constants such as M_PI, TRUE/FALSE, PHP_INT_MAX, ....
Another advantage is security. You don't need to have your secret authentication data for your database or something else in the docroot and even if you like the contended safe mode you can use defcon, too.
Okay, long story cut short. Let's come to the details of defcon. By default you have a config file in /etc/defcon.conf where you can define the constants in a C-like syntax.
# Database Config string DBHOST = "localhost"; string DBUSER = "root"; string DBPASS = ""; string DBNAME = "test"; # Parsertest int T1 = 123; int T2 = 1.3; int T3 = "test"; real T4 = 1; string T5 = hello # should work too logical T6 = true; logical T7 = false; logical T8 = 234
On PHP side you can access the constants by writing ...
<?php var_dump(DBHOST); ?>
... for example. What do we see? Right, we see the expected output:
string(9) "localhost"
The parser is very flexible. As you can see, you not have to quote single-token strings and all entrys are typesafe. You can assign constants with every value and they will be casted in normal PHP-manner. A few words to the datatypes at the end of this demonstration. There are many datatypes available that are not available in PHP. But to have a bigger list I defined alias names depending on the names of other languages.
If you don't see any sense in PHP-defcon: This project is surely only a proof of concept for writing a flexible config-parser. But combined with the positve aspects of above I have to say that I use PHP-defcon in my own projects.
You might also be interested in the following
Sorry, comments are closed for this article. Contact me if you want to leave a note.
2 Comments on „Global Constants with PHP”
Hi There,
Really very Nice Post,PHP provides two methods of defining constants: global-scope constants and class ... introduced with PHP 3, to allow for logarithmic-time searching of the constants
Thanks for sharing
Thanks,
Mick
Quite nice idea but i've never seen some php-project without includes or file-requirements. So you can just save at least one single file-include (your config-file). Imho large scalable projects never use a single php-file for a whole pagemodule.
For security-reasons the config-file obviously should never be saved in the document root directory. So you neither need an authentication algorithm. ;) If your php-engine sucks it'll be impossible to get the e.g. config.php file if its located in another directory than document root.
I solved this single include with memcached wich i already use in my project. So if my $config-array isn't located in memcache i include the config file an put the array to my memcache.
Anyway the idea and solution is quite good i only would like to see where it's better to use. e.g. for customized functions to sort or order some big values faster, create pictures faster etc.
Regards