On 19/11/2024 23:14, Rowan Tommins [IMSoP] wrote:
On 19/11/2024 13:48, Hammed Ajao wrote:
So if symfony and laravel do this, whose best practices are we going
by exactly, yours?
One common citation for this is "The Twelve-Factor App"
[https://12factor.net/], a methodology/manifesto published in 2011 by
some engineers from Heroku as a way to build a particular sort of
cloud-native service-based application. Coincidentally, an open-source
project to update and expand on it was officially announced last week:
https://12factor.net/blog/open-source-announcement
The idea is that "in a twelve-factor app":
- configuration comes directly from the environment; for instance,
provided by the orchestration layer in a container-based deployment
- it is not written to a file, but passed directly to the application
as environment variables
- it does not indicate a named environment, but configures the
application directly
When people struggled with development environments which didn't have
a suitable place for these variables to come from, the ".env file" was
invented - a way to emulate the environment variables that a "real"
deployment would receive.
This then took on a life of its own, and eventually ".env" became just
another format for configuration files: instead of "development.ini"
and "production.ini", you have ".env.development" and
".env.production". We came full circle, and the only thing which
actually comes from the environment is a master switch to choose the
file to load.
Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with the "master
switch" approach for a lot of applications. Not everybody works for a
company with hundreds of developers, and a dozen kubernetes clusters
running A/B tests on continuously deployed code. Sometimes you really
do know you have 2, or 3, or 4, environments to configure.
However, I don't think the master switch is something that should be
hard-coded in a server. Maybe you know that if it's running under "php
-S", it's "dev mode", and it it's running under Apache, it's "live
mode"; if so, you can look at PHP_SAPI / php_sapi_name(). But maybe
you do run Apache on a dev server; or you have separate debug and QA
modes.
You wrote the perfect post summarising a brief history of configuration
injection and brought it back to the main point that the master switch
does not belong in the web server, and I hadn't heard about the 12factor
open source announcement so I learned something new, too! Bravo. Thanks
for posting this and agree with everything stated herein.
Cheers,
Bilge
