[FIXED] How to provide configurable scripts with PHP composer

Issue

I want to provide a script that can be installed with PHP's package manager composer and that must be configurable.

With composer, we can easily define vendor binaries.

However, I don't see any possibility to configure them.

One could include a configuration file from within the package. However, name and location of the vendor directory are configurable, so this will not be very reliable.

For comparison: With Python's package manager pip, we can use environment variables for the configuration. We can set the environment variables while activating the virtual environment, e.g. by using tools like the virtualenvwrapper.

There must be at least experiments with similar approaches in the PHP community.

Addendum: The story behind

I have scripts that synchronize the databases and user generated files for test versions of websites.

For Django sites, I'm always using the same scripts, they rely on environment variables that I define with the virtualenvwrapper.

For Drupal sites, one can achieve a lot with drush.

But for Wordpress, I cannot find a simple and clean tool. It should

• live outside the folders available to the public
• be installable with composer, eventually in combination with other general-purpose-PHP-tools
• use a simple and robust way to detect the settings.

To be honest, I'm missing the virtualenvwrapper in PHP. The virtualenvwrapper is a linux script that basically does two things:

1. It activates a Python virtualenvironment. Translated to PHP that would mean that everything that follows uses the autoloader of a certain composer package.
2. It executes a script when activating or deactivating the virtualenvironment. There, one has the possibility to define environment variables a do any other useful things.

Solution

I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve, but there are plenty of options if you want to use env vars in Php.

https://github.com/symfony/dotenv is one of them and well maintained.

<?php
use Symfony\Component\Dotenv\Dotenv;

$dotenv = new Dotenv();
$dotenv->load(__DIR__.'/path/to/.env');

Then you can use those env var the way you want for configuration purposes. E.g. for DB config:

$someSettings = [
    // Db config
    DB_CONNECTION => [
        'host' => getenv('DB_HOST'),
        'username' => getenv('DB_USERNAME'),
        'password' => getenv('DB_PASSWORD'),
        'database' => getenv('DB_DATABASE')
    ]
];

Answered By - Raph