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Settings bundle

Settings-bundle is a symfony bundle that let you easily create and manage user-configurable settings, which are changeable via a web frontend. It allows for easy creation of type-safe settings objects, which can be easily managed and changed via a web frontend in your symfony application.

Introduction

By default, symfony is mostly configured by parameters in configuration files, where a recompilation of the container is required, or via environment variables, which can not be easily changed by the application itself.

However, you often want administrators and users of your application let change settings and configuration of your application. This bundle provides a simple way to do this. Unlike other bundles with a similar goal, this bundle tries to be as modular as possible and to be as type-safe as possible. Therefore you define your Settings as a class, and access objects of this class in your application, instead of doing simple key-value lookups with mixed return types.

All relevant definitions of settings are done directly in the settings class via metadata attributes. This makes it easy to understand and maintain the settings. The bundle also provides a simple way to generate forms to change the settings, which can be easily integrated into your application.

Features

• Class based settings, which get easily managed by the bundle
• Type-safe access to settings
• Easy to use API
• Retrieve settings via dependency injection in service constructors
• Almost zero configuration required in many cases, as the bundle tries to derive as much information as possible from code metadata like property types, etc.
• Various storage backends, like database, json files, PHP files, etc. (custom backends can be easily implemented)
• Use symfony/validator to easily restrict possible values of settings parameters
• Automatically generate forms to change settings
• Easy possibility to version settings and automatically migrate old stored data to the current format
• Possibility to lazy load settings, so that only the settings, which are really needed, are loaded
• Profiler integration for easy debugging
• Ability to use environment variables for easy configuration on automated deployments

Requirements

• PHP 8.1 or higher
• Symfony 6.4 or higher (compatible with Symfony 7.0)
• Symfony/forms and Symfony/validator required if forms should be generated or validation should be used
• twig required if you want to use the twig extension to access settings in your templates
• doctrine/orm and doctrine-bundle required if you want to use the doctrine storage adapter

Installation

Add the bundle to your symfony project via composer:

If you are using symfony flex, the bundle should be automatically enabled. Otherwise you have to add the bundle to your config/bundles.php file:

Usage

The following section is just a quick overview. See documentation for full info.

Settings classes are simple PHP classes, which are annotated with the #[Settings] attribute. They must live in the path configured to store settings classes (normally src/Settings), in your symfony project. The bundle will automatically find and register all settings classes in this directory.

The properties of the classes are used for storing the different data. Similar to the #[ORM\Column] attribute of doctrine, you can use the #[SettingsParameter] attribute to make a class property to a managed parameter. The properties can be public, protected or private (as SettingsBundle accesses them via reflection), but you have some kind of possibility to access the properties to get/set the configuration parameters in your software. You have to configure, which type mapper should be used to map the normalized data from the storage backend to the type of property. The bundle comes with a few default type mappers, but you can also implement your own type mappers.

The main way to work with settings is to use the SettingsManagerInterface service. It offers a get() method, which allows to retrieve the current settings for a given settings class. If not loaded yet, the manager will load the desired settings from the storage backend (or initialize a fresh instance with default values). The instances are cached, so that the manager will always return the same instance for a given settings class. The manager also offers a save() method, which allows to save the current settings to the storage backend and persist the changes.

Alternatively if you have a service, which depends on the settings, you can inject the current settings instance directly via dependency injection. The bundle registers a service for each settings class, which can be injected into your services like any other service. Internally the settings manager get() method is called to retrieve a lazy loaded settings instance:

The instance injected via dependency injection is the same as the one you would get via the settings manager. This means, that all changes to the settings instance are updated automatically in all parts of your application.

Forms

The bundle can automatically generate forms to change settings classes. This is done via the SettingsFormFactoryInterface, which creates a form builder containing fields to edit one or more settings classes. You can also render just a subset of the settings. Validation attributes are checked and mapped to form errors. This way you can easily create a controller, to let users change the settings:

Form rendering can be customized via the Parameter attributes. See documentation for full info.

Twig templates

In twig templates you can access the settings via the settings_instance() function, which behaves like the SettingsManagerInterface::get() function and returns the current settings instance:

License

SettingsBundle is licensed under the MIT License. This mostly means that you can use this bundle for whatever you want (even use it commercially) as long as you retain the copyright/license information.

See LICENSE for more information.