One common frustration when creating websites for clients is how to deal with configuration? You want to get the site ready to go, with all the settings exactly as they should be. Ideally, you want this in version control so that it doesn't get lost.

And you can't forget about the clients. As the site gets more popular the clients will want to change settings, tweaking the site to perform as they need, and support possible new use cases. You don't want to have to update the site and deploy new configuration changes every time this happens. Or create a new migration to update settings in the database. I could continue, but I'm sure you all have your own versions of this story you could tell.

If only we could have the best of both worlds.

Hello Settings!

The CodeIgniter team is proud to announce the release of a new library to help you deal with just this situation. CodeIgniter Settings is a standalone package that can be added to existing applications or used in new projects.

This library provides a new helper method setting() that you can use in place of config() calls (with small modifications). It will first check the database to see if it can find a saved setting. If it doesn't find a match, it will fall back to the associated config file.

// Instead of
$foo = config('App')->foo;

// Use
$foo = setting('App.foo');

It's all described over at the GitHub repo.

It has been optimized to hit the database as little as possible when reading settings, it's most common task, so you won't see much impact at all on your app's performance.

We hope that you'll find it as useful as we do and will enjoy using it and maybe even contribute back to help make it better for all of us.