Config

The config files

There are two main config files in SuiteCRM, both of which are in the root SuiteCRM folder. These are config.php and config_override.php. The definitions in here provide various configuration options for SuiteCRM. All the way from the details used to access the database to how many entries to show per page in the list view. Most of these options are accessible from the SuiteCRM administration page. However some are only definable in the config files.

config.php

This is the main SuiteCRM config file and includes important information like the database settings and the current SuiteCRM version.

Generally settings in this file wont be changed by hand. An exception to this is if SuiteCRM has been moved or migrated. In which case you may need to change the database settings and the site_url. Let’s look at the database settings first:

Example 10.1: Database config definition

'dbconfig' =>
array (
   'db_host_name' => 'localhost',
   'db_host_instance' => 'SQLEXPRESS',
   'db_user_name' => 'dbuser',
   'db_password' => 'dbpass',
   'db_name' => 'dbname',
   'db_type' => 'mysql',
   'db_port' => '',
   'db_manager' => 'MysqliManager',
),

Here we can see this instance is setup to access a local MySQL instance using the username/password dbuser/dbpass and accessing the database named ‘dbname’.

The site url settings are even simpler:

Example 10.2: Setting the site URL

'site_url' => 'http://example.com/suitecrm',

The site url for the above is simply ‘http://example.com/suitecrm’ if we were moving this instance to, for example, suite.example.org, then we can simply place that value in the file.

These are generally the only two instances where you would directly change config.php. For other changes you would either make the change through SuiteCRM itself or you would use the config_override.php file.

config_override.php

config_override.php allows you to make config changes without risking breaking the main config file. This is achieved quite simply by adding, editing or removing items from the $sugar_config variable. The config_override.php file will be merged with the existing config allowing, as the name suggests, overriding the config. For example in config_override.php we can add our own, new, config item:

Example 10.3: Adding a custom config value

$sugar_config['enable_the_awesome'] = true;

or we can edit an existing config option in a very similar manner by simply overwriting it:

Example 10.4: Overwriting an existing config value

$sugar_config['logger']['level'] = 'debug';

Using config options

We may want to access config options in custom code (or as detailed above if we have created our own config setting we may want to use that). We can easily get the config using the php global keyword:

Example 10.5: Accessing a config setting within SuiteCRM

function myCustomLogic(){
  //Get access to config
  global $sugar_config;
  //use the config values
  if(!empty($sugar_config['enable_the_awesome'])){
    doTheAwesome();
  }
}

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