Trying to set up a new Zend Framework (ZF) website, I struggled once again with getting the setup correct. I learned some lessons, and this post is supposed to help me remember them.

First, the requirements.

1) ZF websites need rewrite rules to force all the urls through index.php so the can be picked apart. Also, ZF websites using the ZF config mechanisms need an APPLICATION_ENV php variable set somewhere in the site configuration, so the website can figure out where it is running and make hosting specific decisions (like, e.g. where the database will be, whether to turn on debugging, etc.).

2) I want to keep the website in a repository, and check it out onto different web-hosts  for testing, development, production. So any configuration stuff which is web-host specific should not be in the repository but in the host configuration files.

3) Although the urls for the ZF website need to be rewritten to index.php, there may be other urls (like phpmyadmin) that should not be rewritten. So the configuration has to allow for this. In particular on some websites (like wmbuck.net) the website itself redirects non-logged in users to the blog (this blog) with a redirect to /blog/. The rules need to allow normal handling of this url (to select /blog/index.php) in the normal way.

The rewrite rules and application environment stuff can be put in an .htaccess file within the DocumentRoot. Most ZF documentation describes doing it this way. But for me, at least the application environment variable can’t be here because everything under DocumentRoot is in the repository. So I want APPLICATION_ENV oregano on one box, APPLICATION_ENV tarragon on another box, and if I put this in .htaccess, and .htaccess is in the repository the file can only have one or the other setting.
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