PHP YAML
Installing YAML extension
YAML does not come with a standard PHP installation, instead it needs to be installed as a PECL extension. On linux/unix it can be installed with a simple
pecl install yamlNote that libyaml-dev package must be installed on the system, as the PECL package is simply a wrapper around libYAML calls. Installation on Windows machines is different - you can either download a pre-compiled DLL or build from sources.
Using YAML to store application configuration
YAML provides a way to store structured data. The data can be a simple set of name-value pairs or a complex hierarchical data with values even being arrays.
Consider the following YAML file:
database:
driver: mysql
host: database.mydomain.com
port: 3306
db_name: sample_db
user: myuser
password: Passw0rd
debug: true
country: usLet's say, it's saved as config.yaml. Then to read this file in PHP the following code can be used:
$config = yaml_parse_file('config.yaml');
print_r($config);
print_r will produce the following output:
Array
(
[database] => Array
(
[driver] => mysql
[host] => database.mydomain.com
[port] => 3306
[db_name] => sample_db
[user] => myuser
[password] => Passw0rd
)
[debug] => 1
[country] => us
)Now config parameters can be used by simply using array elements:
$dbConfig = $config['database'];
$connectString = $dbConfig['driver']
. ":host={$dbConfig['host']}"
. ":port={$dbConfig['port']}"
. ":dbname={$dbConfig['db_name']}"
. ":user={$dbConfig['user']}"
. ":password={$dbConfig['password']}";
$dbConnection = new \PDO($connectString, $dbConfig['user'], $dbConfig['password']);