Symfony2 Composer and environment variables

Question

I would like to set the configuration of my symfony2 project using environment variables.

In the server I have defined:

SYMFONY__DATABASE__USER
SYMFONY__DATABASE__PASSWORD
SYMFONY__DATABASE__NAME
SYMFONY__DATABASE__HOST
SYMFONY__DATABASE__DRIVER

My parameters.yml.dist looks like this:

#app/config/parameters.yml.dist
parameters:
    database_host:     "%database.host%"
    database_port:     ~
    database_name:     "%database.name%"
    database_user:     "%database.user%"
    database_password: "%database.password%"
    database_driver:   "%database.driver%"

when I run composer I get an exception

composer install --dev --no-interaction --prefer-source
[Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Exception\ParameterNotFoundException]                                                   
You have requested a non-existent parameter "database.driver". Did you mean one of these: "database_user", "database_driver"?

These variables are defined in the server so I can modify the parameters.yml.dist to define these values. But this does not seams the right way, because wat I really want to use are the environment variables.

Note: I want to read this environment variables in travis, heroku and my vagrant machine. I only want to have in the repository the vagrant machine variables.

Which is the proper way to do this? How should look my parameters.yml.dist?

Answer 1

Looks you are doing everything okay.

Here is the complete documentation for Setting Environment Variables which I believe you already read.

What is important to note is this:

Also, in order for your console to work (which does not use Apache), you must export these as shell variables. On a Unix system, you can run the following:

$ export SYMFONY__DATABASE__USER=user
$ export SYMFONY__DATABASE__PASSWORD=secret

I remember once I have a similar issue, I was setting everything on APACHE, but when running commands it wasn't working because I forgot to EXPORT the variables on the system.

Be aware that using export is a temp solution, if you reset your server those values will be lost, you will need to setup in a permanent way according to your OS.

Answer 2

I think you solved this long time ago, but the problem is actually that you have 2 _ between DATABASE and USER and the parser for this have a string replace function that replaces every __ with a . .

For your example to work you should have written like this:

SYMFONY__DATABASE_USER -> database_user SYMFONY__DATABASE__USER -> database.user

Answer 3

You can try this bundle if your system version is >= 2.6.2:

This bundle provides a way to read parameters from environment variables at runtime. The value defined in the container parameter is used as fallback when the environment variable is not available.