PHP: One way of differing between DEV and PROD environments with Kohana

Torleif — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:22:49 +0000

Usually when I develop websites, they will be deployed to a domain, for example www.geekality.net. But when I develop this site locally, I usually want it to be in some sub-folder of localhost, since I usually have more than one website going on, and I don’t want the trouble with virtual-hosts. So, to solve this for my Kohana websites I do the following simple thing. This technique would work for other websites programmed in PHP as well, but the PHP part would probably be a bit different.

Apache httpd.conf

First of all, I add this to the end of my httpd.conf.

# Custom htaccess file
AccessFileName .htaccess.local .htaccess

Make sure to check if there is already a line with AccessFileName though, and if it is, just edit that instead of adding another one

Environment variables

With that done, you can have one regular .htaccess which would be used in production and a local one for your machine.

#.htaccess
SetEnv KOHANA_ENV production
SetEnv KOHANA_BASE /
RewriteBase /

#.htaccess.local
SetEnv KOHANA_ENV development
SetEnv KOHANA_BASE /geekality/
RewriteBase /geekality/

These two files can now live side by side, checked in to source control, and not cause any trouble. Alternatively you could set the local one to be ignored so that other developers could create their own setup.

Kohana bootstrap

Now comes the Kohana specific part. In my application/bootstrap.php I have the following (among other stuff of course).

if (isset($_SERVER['KOHANA_ENV']))
{
Kohana::$environment = constant('Kohana::'.strtoupper($_SERVER['KOHANA_ENV']));
}

Kohana::init(array(
'base_url' => $_SERVER['KOHANA_BASE'],
'index_file' => '',
'profile' => Kohana::$environment !== Kohana::PRODUCTION,
'caching' => Kohana::$environment !== Kohana::DEVELOPMENT,
'errors' => TRUE,
));

And that’s pretty much all there is to it. This way I don’t have to worry about not overwriting the .htaccess on my production server or stuff like that. The .htaccess is untouched and just for the production environment

Kohana PHP framework

Torleif — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:59:46 +0000

sxc.hu

As you might know, I am developing some internal software for LifeStyleTV at the moment. Because of various slightly annoying circumstances I am stuck using PHP and MySQL for this. Not the worst of course, but I must say I really do prefer C# over PHP for oh so many reasons. But anyways, that wasn’t the point of this post. The point is that for my life to become hopefully quite a bit easier and hopefully a lot more organized I decided to go looking for a framework I can use as a base for the software I will be developing.

After much looking I finally stumbled over a framework called Kohana.

Kohana is an open source, object oriented H MVC web framework built using PHP5 by a team of volunteers that aims to be swift, secure, and small.

Kohana is licensed under a BSD license, so you can legally use it for any kind of open source, commercial, or personal project.

Getting started with it was a bit of a hassle because the documentation isn’t the greatest, but the small community has been helpful and the framework is pretty clear once you grasp the basics. For me it was particularly difficult since I don’t really have that much experience with MVC frameworks at all. But so far it has been very fun to learn and code with it.

There are currently two versions of Kohana, 2 and 3. These are pretty much different frameworks, and I decided to go for version 3 as it seem to be cleaner and support HMVC which seems very interesting.

Here are some very helpful resources that helped me get started:

Alrighty, will blog more about Kohana some other day. Maybe even some tutorials…?

Are you using any PHP frameworks? What do you use? Please share!

Geekality » Kohana

PHP: One way of differing between DEV and PROD environments with Kohana

Apache httpd.conf

Environment variables

Kohana bootstrap

Kohana PHP framework