How to setup a Zend_Application with an application.ini and a user.ini

Question

I am using Zend_Application and it does not feel right that I am mixing in my application.ini both application and user configuration.

What I mean with this is the following. For example, my application needs some library classes in the namespace MyApp_ . So in application.ini I put autoloaderNamespaces[] = "MyApp_". This is pure application configuration, no-one except a programmer would change these. On the other hand I put there a database configuration, something that a SysAdmin would change.

My idea is that I would split options between an application.ini and an user.ini, where the options in user.ini take preference (so I can define standard values in application.ini).

Is this a good idea? How can I best implement this? The idea's I have are

• Extending Zend_Application to take multiple config files
• Making an init function in my Bootstrap loading the user.ini
• Parsing the config files in my index.php and pass these to Zend_Application (sounds ugly)

What shall I do? I would like to have the 'cleanest' solution, which is prepared for the future (newer ZF versions, and other developers working on the same app)

Answer 1

I found a solution to this issue that may be new to framework version 1.10. When creating the Zend Application object, you can pass in 2 configuration file paths in the options array that get merged together:

$application = new Zend_Application(
    APPLICATION_ENV,
    array(
        'config' => array(
            APPLICATION_PATH . '/configs/application.ini',
            APPLICATION_PATH . '/configs/user.ini'
        ),
    )
);

Answer 2

you know this will merge as much inis as you want?

in application.ini

[production]
config[] = APPLICATION_PATH "/configs/dsn.ini"
config[] = APPLICATION_PATH "/configs/error.ini"
...