In this new post to his blog, Joshua Thijssen looks at using the Augeas tool in a PHP application. Augeas is a configuration editing tool, making it easy to parse many different types of configs and transform them into a tree structure.

Even though I really like using sed and awk, sometimes its hard to change or add parameters in configuration files. Big sed statements that may or may not work, double checking if everything has been done correctly etc. Augeas is a really cool tool that lets you view / add / modify and delete all kind of data from configuration files. If you are using Puppet, you are probably aware of this tool, but I notice that a lot of PHP developers have never heard of it.. Let’s explore..

He shows an example of a configuration file and how the "augtool" command line script can be used to modify one of them. He then shows how to use the tool's library to set the server's "date.timezone" setting in the php.ini.