Yoan Blanc’s weblog

When you build a (web) application, you sometimes want to store user configuration (like password (sha1’d of course) or what else). What’s the nicest solution ?

Database ?

f**king hell, seriously ? Forget that.

XML file ?

100% geek but pain-in-the-arse to parse and maintain.

INI

So easy to understand, comment, diff.

I’m not very umpartial because I dislike database-usage-for-everything and because I’ve spent lot of time to build the following PHP class that parse and write ini file. Ini files are used in doContent for every things that are configurable (but there’s some XML too, because it rocks).

INI file

; A comment
[section1]

; variable A
var_a = toto

var_b = tata

Manipulating with PHP

<?php
include_once("ini.class.php");
$filename = "test.ini";

//--
header('Content-type:text/plain');

// =& for PHP 4 (avoid the object copy)
// true for processing section (default is false like parse_ini_file)
$data =& new ini($ini, true);

$data->setValue(pi(), 'var_a', 'section1');
$data->setValue('hello world!', 'var_b', 'section1');
$data->setValue('Lorem lipsum', 'var_c', 'section2');

// display the file (-->__toString() not necessary for PHP5)
echo $data->__toString();
?>

The result

; A comment
[section1]

; variable A
var_a = 3.14159265359

var_b = hello world

[section2]
var_c = Lorem lipsum

As you can see, all the comments are preserved, the values are modified and the new section section2 and its value var_c are correctly added.

Don’t forget to protect yourself

Don't autorize the direct access to these files. For example, you can do it with a traditionnal Apache .htaccess that contains :

<Files *.ini>
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
</Files>

Something that like this at the first line of your ini can avoid the php inclusion :

; <?php exit();?>

And a big hurray for Batiste, he’ll start his new job tommorrow.