periwinkle/array-config

Allows for using native PHP files as config files in PHP!

Using YAML and XML as configuration scripts in PHP projects has become prolific. However, this comes with the overhead of having to validate, process, and convert those configuration files to PHP to be used.

What if you could just use native PHP arrays for configuration files?

Now you can!

periwinkle/array-config brings revolutionary support to PHP to use PHP in PHP.

Installation

periwinkle/array-config can be installed via Composer:

composer require periwinkle/array-config

Usage

Let's say you had a configuration file written in Yaml:

database:
  driver: pgsql
  host: localhost
  name: awesomedb
  user: awesomesauce
  password: mustangSally

With periwinkle/array-config, you can now write this configuration file as pure PHP!

return [
    'database' => [
        'driver' => 'pgsql',
        'host' => 'localhost',
        'name' => 'awesomedb',
        'user' => 'awesomesauce',
        'password' => 'mustangSally'
    ]
];

To use this config file, simply:

$config = include 'configs/database.php';

No need to parse Yaml! No need to parse Xml!

Older Versions of PHP

array-config is so revolutionary, we've added support going all the way back to PHP 3! The examples above use the short array syntax introduced in PHP 5.4. If you're living in the past, you can still use array-config*:

return array(
    'database' => array(
        'driver' => 'pgsql',
        'host' => 'localhost',
        'name' => 'awesomedb',
        'user' => 'awesomesauce',
        'password' => 'mustangSally'
    )
);

Usage:

$config = include 'configs/database.php';

* Note: Composer will not work with some older versions. For those versions, feel free to copy the array-config source code to a directory within your project. Any directory will do; we suggest a functions/ or includes/ directory if you have one.

Framework Support

Ping your favorite neighborhood framework developer, and tell them you want the ability to use native PHP config files in their projects!

Join the array party!

• PhpUnit/DbUnit Fixtures: Provides support for native PHP array based fixtures for DbUnit.

Seriously

Yeah, I know you can just cache the result of the Yaml or Xml parsing so that it doesn't have to be done over and over again, but there's no valid reason to use it in the first place.

Just use PHP.