koseven/system/guide/kohana/files/config.md

Config Files

Configuration files are used to store any kind of configuration needed for a module, class, or anything else you want. They are plain PHP files, stored in the config/ directory, which return an associative array:

<?php

return array(
    'setting' => 'value',
    'options' => array(
        'foo' => 'bar',
    ),
);

If the above configuration file was called myconf.php, you could access it using:

$config = Kohana::$config->load('myconf');
$options = $config->get('options')

Merge

Configuration files are slightly different from most other files within the cascading filesystem in that they are merged rather than overloaded. This means that all configuration files with the same file path are combined to produce the final configuration. The end result is that you can overload individual settings rather than duplicating an entire file.

For example, if we wanted to change or add to an entry in the inflector configuration file, we would not need to duplicate all the other entries from the default configuration file.

// config/inflector.php

<?php

return array(
    'irregular' => array(
        'die' => 'dice', // does not exist in default config file
        'mouse' => 'mouses', // overrides 'mouse' => 'mice' in the default config file
);

Creating your own config files

Let's say we want a config file to store and easily change things like the title of a website, or the google analytics code. We would create a config file, let's call it site.php:

// config/site.php

<?php

return array(
    'title' => 'Our Shiny Website',
    'analytics' => FALSE, // analytics code goes here, set to FALSE to disable
);

We could now call Kohana::$config->load('site.title') to get the site name, and Kohana::$config->load('site.analytics') to get the analytics code.

Let's say we want an archive of versions of some software. We could use config files to store each version, and include links to download, documentation, and issue tracking.

// config/versions.php

<?php

return array(
    '1.0.0' => array(
        'codename' => 'Frog',
        'download' => 'files/ourapp-1.0.0.tar.gz',
        'documentation' => 'docs/1.0.0',
        'released' => '06/05/2009',
        'issues' => 'link/to/bug/tracker',
    ),
    '1.1.0' => array(
        'codename' => 'Lizard',
        'download' => 'files/ourapp-1.1.0.tar.gz',
        'documentation' => 'docs/1.1.0',
        'released' => '10/15/2009',
        'issues' => 'link/to/bug/tracker',
    ),
    /// ... etc ...
);

You could then do the following:

// In your controller
$view->versions = Kohana::$config->load('versions');

// In your view:
foreach ($versions as $version)
{
    // echo some html to display each version
}