layout: default title: Philosophy description: This library takes a highly-opinionated approach that fills a gap in the existing config library landscape

Philosophy

There are lots of great configuration libraries out there, each one serving a slightly different purpose. As a result, this library aims to satisfy a particular niche not being served well by others by taking a simple yet opinionated approach to configuration with the following goals:

• The configuration should operate on arrays with nested values which are easily accessible
• The configuration structure should be defined with strict schemas defining the overall structure, allowed types, and allowed values
• Schemas should be defined using a simple, fluent interface
• You should be able to add and combine schemas but never modify existing ones
• Both the configuration values and the schema should be defined and managed with PHP code
• Schemas should be immutable; they should never change once they are set
• Configuration values should never define or influence the schemas

As a result, this library will likely never support features like:

• Loading and/or exporting configuration values or schemas using YAML, XML, or other files
  • You can still implement this yourself, if needed
• Parsing configuration values from a command line or other user interface
• Dynamically changing the schema, allowed values, or default values based on other configuration values

If you need that functionality you should check out other great libraries like:

• symfony/config
• symfony/options-resolver
• hassankhan/config
• consolidation/config
• laminas/laminas-config

Dependencies

To help facilitate this approach, we heavily rely on the following two open-source libraries under-the-hood:

• nette/schema to define and process the configuration schemas
• dflydev/dot-access-data to simplify reading/writing the values

These were chosen specifically for being minimal, well-written, and unlikely to conflict with other dependencies you might have installed.