Passing global configurations in PHP

Question

I have the following:

_CONFIG.php

<?php namespace App\go;
define('x_client_id', 'client');
define('x_client_secret', '');
define('x_username', 'ervice');

another.php

<?php namespace App\go;

include _CONFIG.php;
class goapp
{
    protected $_client_id = x_client_id;
    protected $_client_secret = x_client_secret;
    protected $_username = x_username;

This does not seem to pass or load the variables. Is there a correct way to move the variables out of the files and create a master config?

is your code actually `include _CONFIG.php;`?, or rather `include "_CONFIG.php";`? the former would try to access the constants _CONFIG and php, concat them, and include the resulting string "_CONFIGphp", which would not throw any errors, but only notices, which would be suppressed — Franz Gleichmann, Nov 16 '16 at 14:53
Good catch. I didn't use the quotes because someone posted an answer on this site saying it worked and they didn't have quotes. That fixed the issue — Jason, Nov 16 '16 at 14:55
well, you're welcome. but since now it's clear this question is only based on a typo, i think it can be closed. — Franz Gleichmann, Nov 16 '16 at 14:57
How did you not catch the error before? didn't you get an error warning? when debugging code, it's important to not turn off error_reporting.. .you can turn it on by using `error_reporting(E_ALL);` — , Nov 16 '16 at 14:59
When you require a file be present use `require`, this also will throw a fatal error if the file isn't accessible (which was your issue). The question can be deleted since it was a typo. — chris85, Nov 16 '16 at 15:00

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:32

You cannot initialize class properties to constants defined using the define construct. Reference this quote from the manual:

They are defined by using one of the keywords public, protected, or private, followed by a normal variable declaration. This declaration may include an initialization, but this initialization must be a constant value--that is, it must be able to be evaluated at compile time and must not depend on run-time information in order to be evaluated.

The only thing you can initialize class properties to is what is available to the interpreter during compile time and not runtime. What this basically boils down to is that you cannot initialize these properties to anything that requires other code to run first in order to be defined.

An exception is the const keyword, since these are evaluated at compile time.

Passing global configurations in PHP

1 Answers1