Magento's deployment configuration

Purpose of the deployment configuration

Magento’s deployment configuration consists of the shared and system-specific configuration for your installation. Magento’s deployment configuration is divided between:

• <Magento base dir>/app/etc/config.php, referred to as the shared configuration file, because you can check it in to source control and use it in your development, staging, and production systems

  config.php contains the list of installed modules, themes, and language packages; and shared configuration settings

• <Magento base dir>/app/etc/env.php, which contains system-specific settings, such as:

Together, config.php and env.php are referred to as Magento’s deployment configuration because they are created during installation and are required to start Magento.

Unlike other module configuration files, Magento’s deployment configuration is loaded into memory when Magento initializes, is not merged with any other files, and cannot be extended. (config.php and env.php are merged with each other, however.)

Details about the deployment configuration

config.php and env.php are PHP files that return a multi-dimensional associative array, which is basically a hierarchical arrangement of configuration parameters and values.

On the top level of this array are configuration segments. A segment has arbitrary content (a scalar value or a nested array) distinguished by an arbitrary key—where both the key and its value are defined by the Magento framework.

Magento\Framework\App\DeploymentConfig merely provides access to these sections but does not allow you to extend them.

On the next hierarchy level, items in each segment are ordered according to the module sequence definition, which is obtained by merging all modules’ configuration files, with the exception of disabled modules.

The following sections discusses the structure and contents of the deployment configuration—config.php and env.php.

• Manage installed modules
• Environmental configuration

Manage installed modules

config.php lists your installed modules. Magento provides both command-line and web-based utilities to manage modules (install, uninstall, enable, disable, or upgrade).

Examples:

• Uninstall components: bin/magento setup:uninstall
• Enable or disable components: bin/magento module:enable, bin/magento module:disable.
• Component Manager
• System Upgrade

config.php snippet:

return array (
  'modules' =>
  array (
    'Magento_Core' => 1,
    'Magento_Store' => 1,
    'Magento_Theme' => 1,
    'Magento_Authorization' => 1,
    'Magento_Directory' => 1,
    'Magento_Backend' => 1,
    'Magento_Backup' => 1,
    'Magento_Eav' => 1,
    'Magento_Customer' => 1,
...
  ),
);

The value 1 or 0 indicates whether a module is enabled or disabled.

Disabled modules are not recognized by the Magento application; in other words, they don’t participate in merging configuration, in dependency injection, events, plug-ins, and so on. Disabled modules do not modify the storefront or Admin and don’t affect routing.

The only practical difference of a module being disabled and being completely absent in the code base is that a disabled module is found by the autoloader, enabling its classes and constants to be reused in other code.

Environmental configuration

The following table provides details about each env.php segment and its structure.

__/db
|__/connection
| |__/[default]
|   |-- host
|   |-- dbname
|   |-- username
|   |-- password
|   |-- model [mysql4]
|   |-- initStatements [SET NAMES utf8;]
|   |-- active [1]
|-- table_prefix

__/resource
 |__/default_setup
   |-- connection [default]

__/session
 |__/save
   |-- <files|db>

__/backend
 |-- frontName

__/cache
 |__/frontend
   |__/See frontend options

__/install
 |-- date

__/crypt
 |-- key

__/cache_types
 |-- <enumerated cache types>

Related topic

Module configuration files