Question

I am currently writing a program in php. I want to let the user of my script change some settings, like database location and user.
These variable are placed on the first lines of the script.

Now i want to access these variables from everywhere of the script like in classes and functions.

I used globals for this. But a colleague told me not to use globals.

So what is the common way to store and access settings in php?

Answer 1

You could use constants which are global by default:

define('APPLICATION_SETTING', true);

Otherwise you could use a Registry Singleton class in which you load the settings and store them in a class private variable.
Classic Registry class structure:

class Registry {
    private $instance = NULL;
    private $vars = array();
    private __construct() {/**/}
    public static function getInstance() {/**/}
    public function get($key) {/**/}
    public function set($key, $value) {/**/}
}

And no, I suggest you not to use Injections and stuff patterns. Just use Singleton. With Injection you get everything worse and more complicated.