Efficient and flexible multi-environment config for Craft CMS

Related: Craft3-Multi-Environment for Craft 3.x

Multi-Environment Configs let you easily run a Craft CMS project in local dev, staging, and production. They allow different people to work in different environments without painful setup or coordination. You can read a more in-depth discussion of it in the Multi-Environment Config for Craft CMS article.

There are a number of good approaches to implementing a multi-environment config in Craft CMS, but they each have drawbacks. There are two main approaches typically used are:

1. Multi-Environment Configs - The problem with this approach is that it often results in data stored in a git repo (such as passwords, Stripe keys, etc.) that really shouldn't be.
2. PHP dotenv - The problem with this approach is that PHP dotenv is fairly heavy, and indeed the authors warn against using it in production. Instantiating the Composer auto-loader and reading in the .env file for every request adds unnecessary overhead.

Craft-Multi-Environment (CME) is my attempt to create something that finds a middle-ground between the two approaches.

CME works by including a .env.php file (which is never checked into git) via the Craft index.php file that is loaded for every non-static request.

The .env.php file sets some globally-accessible settings via putenv() for common things like the database password, database user, base URL, etc. You're also free to add your own as you see fit. The craft/config/general.php and craft/config/db.php can thus remain abstracted, and each environment can have their own local settings.

This is more performant than auto-loading a class and reading a .env file for each request, but maintains the same flexibility. Additionally, since we are using getenv() to access the settings, these can be set directly by the webserver (without using the .env.php file at all) for additional security and performance.

Also, since we're using getenv(), these settings are globally accessible in the PHP session, and can for instance be used in a Craft Commerce commerce.php file, accessed via plugins, etc.

CME assumes that you have a folder structure such as this for your project root:

.env.php
craft/
public/
    index.php

If your folder structure is different, that's fine. But you may need to adjust the path to .env.php in the index.php file, and you may need to adjust the way CRAFTENV_BASE_PATH is constructed in your .env.php (or just hardcode the path).

CME will also work fine with localized sites as well, you'll just need to adjust the aforementioned paths as appropriate.

1. Copy craft/config/general.php and craft/config/db.php to your project's craft/config folder
2. Copy public/index.php to your project's public folder
3. Copy example.env.php to your project's root folder, then duplicate it, and rename the copy .env.php
4. Edit the .env.php file, replacing instances of REPLACE_ME with your appropriate settings
5. Add /.env.php to your .gitignore file

The public/index.php file included with CME just has the following added at the top of it (it is otherwise unchanged):

// Load the local Craft environment
if (file_exists('../.env.php'))
    require_once '../.env.php';
// Default environment
if (!defined('CRAFT_ENVIRONMENT'))
    define('CRAFT_ENVIRONMENT', getenv('CRAFTENV_CRAFT_ENVIRONMENT'));

You will need to create an .env.php file for each environment on which your Craft CMS project will be used (other team member's local dev, staging, production, etc.), but the db.php, general.php, and index.php are the same on all environments.

It's recommended that the example.env.php is checked into your git repo, so others can use it for a guide when creating their own local .env.php file.

CME suggests the following environments, each of which can have different Craft settings per environment, independent of the private settings defined in .env.php:

1. * - applies globally to all environments
2. live - your live production environment
3. staging - your staging or pre-production environment for client review, external testing, etc.
4. local - your local development environment

The db.php and config.php define each environment, and you can put whatever Craft Config Settings you desire for each environment in each. The names of the environments and the default settings for each are just suggestions, however. You can change them to be whatever you like.

If you have additional settings that need to be globally accessible, you can just add them to the .env.php. For example, let's say we need a private key for Stripe, you can add this to .env.php by adding it to the $craftenv_vars array:

// The private Stripe key.
'STRIPE_KEY' => 'REPLACE_ME',

CME will auto-prefix all settings in the $craftenv_vars with CRAFTENV_ for semantic reasons, and to avoid namespace collisions.

You should also update the example.env.php to include any settings you add, for reference and your team's reference.

You can access any variables defined in the general.php file in Twig via {{ craft.config }}. e.g.:

{% if craft.config.custom.craftEnv == "local" %}
{% endif %}

The custom sub-array in the config setup is for any non-Craft defined config settings that you might want to include in general.php. Since Craft does a recursive merge on the config settings, you can change just the config settings you need on a per-environment basis.

It's perfectly fine to use CME as discussed above in a production environment. However, if you want an added measure of security and performance, you can set up your webserver to set the same globally accessible settings via webserver config.

It's slightly more secure, in that only a user with admin privileges should have access to the server config files. It's ever so slightly more performant, in that there's no extra .env.php file that is being processed with each request.

This is entirely optional, but if you're interested in doing it, here's how.

1. Keep the original public/index.php file as it came with Craft CMS on your production environment instead of using the index.php that comes with CME.
2. Configure your webserver as described below, and then restart it

Inside the <VirtualHost> block:

SetEnv CRAFTENV_CRAFT_ENVIRONMENT "REPLACE_ME"
SetEnv CRAFTENV_DB_HOST "REPLACE_ME"
SetEnv CRAFTENV_DB_NAME "REPLACE_ME"
SetEnv CRAFTENV_DB_USER "REPLACE_ME"
SetEnv CRAFTENV_DB_PASS "REPLACE_ME"
SetEnv CRAFTENV_SITE_URL "REPLACE_ME"
SetEnv CRAFTENV_BASE_URL "REPLACE_ME"
SetEnv CRAFTENV_BASE_PATH "REPLACE_ME"

(...and any other custom config settings you've added)

Inside the server {} or location ~ \.php {} block or in the fastcgi_params file:

fastcgi_param CRAFTENV_CRAFT_ENVIRONMENT "REPLACE_ME";
fastcgi_param CRAFTENV_DB_HOST "REPLACE_ME";
fastcgi_param CRAFTENV_DB_NAME "REPLACE_ME";
fastcgi_param CRAFTENV_DB_USER "REPLACE_ME";
fastcgi_param CRAFTENV_DB_PASS "REPLACE_ME";
fastcgi_param CRAFTENV_SITE_URL "REPLACE_ME";
fastcgi_param CRAFTENV_BASE_URL "REPLACE_ME";
fastcgi_param CRAFTENV_BASE_PATH "REPLACE_ME";

(...and any other custom config settings you've added)

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