Declaring global variable with php.ini

variables global php
Zstream picture Zstream · Feb 19, 2011 · Viewed 25.4k times · Source

Is it possible to keep variables in php.ini file. Like that we do with the web.config in .net. I like to keep a flag type variable in the php.ini and use it to different projects.

Answer

Alister Bulman picture Alister Bulman · Feb 19, 2011

It's not possible to set user-level variables within a plain php.ini file (or the .htaccess equivilents). There are some PECL modules that do allow that, such as hidef (http://pecl.php.net/package/hidef) - though these would need to be installed on every installation you use.

Including (or pre-including) a file with auto_prepend_file is quite possible - though that would be on every PHP request.

What is frequently done is setting an environment variable as part of the webserver process, which can be read from PHP. In Apache this is quite easy, with the SetEnv module.

SetEnv PRODUCTION_SERVER 1

And accessing it in PHP:

if ($_ENV['PRODUCTION_SERVER']) {...}  // or getenv('PRODUCTION_SERVER')

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