TinyTank

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Configuration ​

TinyTank has two places for settings:

  • config/app.php: the site's settings, committed to the repository.
  • Environment variables: per-server values and secrets, never committed. In development they come from .env.

Environment variables and .env ​

config/app.php reads secrets and per-server values with getenv(). Locally, they come from a .env file in the project root (loaded by symfony/dotenv). On a server, set them as real environment variables, or in that server's own .env.

Real environment variables always win over .env: anything the server already sets (DDEV's web_environment, PHP-FPM's env[...], nginx's fastcgi_param, Apache's SetEnv) is never overridden by the file.

.env.example lists every variable and is the only env file that's committed. Copy it to .env to start. The full list is in the environment reference.

Secrets stay on the server

APP_SECRET and anything else sensitive belong in the environment, never in config/, templates or JavaScript. Vite only inlines variables prefixed VITE_PUBLIC_ into the frontend bundle, so server variables can't leak there by accident.

config/app.php ​

php
return [
    'secret' => getenv('APP_SECRET') ?: throw new RuntimeException('APP_SECRET is not set.'),
    'debug' => getenv('APP_DEBUG') === '1',
    'url' => $url, // from APP_URL, validated
    'trusted_proxies' => [...], // from APP_TRUSTED_PROXIES

    'language' => 'en',
    'languages' => [
        'en' => ['name' => 'English', 'locale' => 'en_US'],
        'it' => ['name' => 'Italiano', 'locale' => 'it_IT'],
    ],

    'blog' => ['per_page' => 20],

    'site' => [
        'name' => 'TinyTank',
        'description' => 'A database-free PHP micro framework…',
        'image' => null,   // default share image, e.g. '/images/og-default.png'
        'author' => null,  // for blog posts and the feed; defaults to the site name
    ],
];

Every key is described in the configuration reference.

Debug mode ​

APP_DEBUG=1 is development mode:

  • nothing is cached: routes, templates, posts and translations are rebuilt on every request
  • blog drafts are visible
  • errors show Symfony's exception page, and PHP warnings throw
  • pages load assets from the Vite dev server while npm run dev runs
  • Twig's strict_variables is on, so a typo in a variable name is an error

Leave it unset (or 0) in production: errors are logged and visitors get a generic error page.

Overriding settings in code ​

Kernel::boot() accepts overrides that are merged over config/app.php. The test suites use this to point the app at fixture content:

php
$app = Kernel::boot($root, debug: false, overrides: [
    'content_dir' => __DIR__ . '/data/content',
    'cache_dir' => sys_get_temp_dir() . '/my-cache',
    'blog' => ['per_page' => 1],
]);

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