Environmental Settings

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  • Validation
  • Autosuggest Inputs

Plugin settings that may need to change per-environment, or contain sensitive information, should be implemented as environmental settings.

Environmental settings are settings whose raw values may reference an environment variable or alias, and which get parsed by craft\helpers\App::parseEnv() (opens new window) at runtime.

Here’s an example model with a $secretKey property that may be set to an environment variable, and a getSecretKey() method that is responsible for parsing the value.

use craft\base\Model;
use craft\helpers\App;

class MyModel extends Model
{
    /**
     * @var string the raw secret key (e.g. '$ENV_NAME')
     */
    public $secretKey;

    /**
     * @return string the parsed secret key (e.g. 'XXXXXXXXXXX')
     */
    public function getSecretKey(): string
    {
        return App::parseEnv($this->secretKey);
    }
}

Validation

If your environmental settings require special validation rules, you can have the validators check the parsed values rather than the raw values using craft\behaviors\EnvAttributeParserBehavior (opens new window).

use craft\base\Model;
use craft\behaviors\EnvAttributeParserBehavior;

class MyModel extends Model
{
    public function behaviors()
    {
        return [
            'parser' => [
                'class' => EnvAttributeParserBehavior::class,
                'attributes' => ['secretKey'],
            ],
        ];
    }

    public function rules()
    {
        return [
            ['secretKey', 'required'],
            ['secretKey', 'string', 'length' => 50],
        ];
    }

    // ...
}

Autosuggest Inputs

To guide users when entering your setting’s value in the control panel, give your setting an autosuggest input.

{% import "_includes/forms" as forms %}

{{ forms.autosuggestField({
  label: "Secret Key"|t('plugin-handle'),
  id: 'secret-key',
  name: 'secretKey',
  value: myModel.secretKey,
  suggestEnvVars: true
}) }}

When suggestEnvVars is set to true, the autosuggest input will call craft\web\twig\variables\Cp::getEnvSuggestions() (opens new window) to get its suggestions, and a tip will show up below the form field advising the user that they can set the value to an environment variable.

If your setting is for a URL or file system path, you should also set suggestAliases to true.

{{ forms.autosuggestField({
  // ...
  suggestEnvVars: true,
  suggestAliases: true
}) }}