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<h1>Include a Local Drupal Settings file for Environment Configuration and Overrides</h1>
<p class="posted text-light">20th December 2014</p>
<p>At the bottom of settings.php, add the following code:</p>
<pre><code class="language-php">$local_settings = __DIR__ . '/settings.local.php';
if (file_exists($local_settings)) {
include $local_settings;
}
</code></pre>
<p>This allows for you to create a new file called settings.local.php within a sites/* directory (the same place as settings.php), and this will be included as an extension of settings.php. You can see the same technique being used within Drupal 8's <a href="http://cgit.drupalcode.org/drupal/tree/sites/default/default.settings.php#n621">default.settings.php</a> file.</p>
<p>Environment specific settings like <code>$databases</code> and <code>$base_url</code> can be placed within the local settings file. Other settings like <code>$conf['locale_custom_strings_en']</code> (string overrides) and <code>$conf['allow_authorize_operations']</code> that would apply to all environments can still be placed in settings.php.</p>
<p>settings.php though is ignored by default by Git by a .gitignore file, so it won't show up as a file available to be committed. There are two ways to fix this. The first is to use the <code>--force</code> option when adding the file which overrides the ignore file:</p>
<pre><code class="language-bash">git add --force sites/default/settings.php
</code></pre>
<p>The other option is to update the .gitignore file itself so that settings.php is no longer ignored. An updated .gitignore file could look like:</p>
<pre><code class="language-bash"># Ignore configuration files that may contain sensitive information.
sites/*/settings.local*.php
# Ignore paths that contain user-generated content.
sites/*/files
sites/*/private
</code></pre>
<p>This will allow for settings.php to be added to Git and committed, but not settings.local.php.</p>
<p class="tags">
Tags:
<a href="https://www.oliverdavies.uk/blog/tags/drupal">drupal</a>, <a href="https://www.oliverdavies.uk/blog/tags/drupal-6">drupal-6</a>, <a href="https://www.oliverdavies.uk/blog/tags/drupal-7">drupal-7</a>, <a href="https://www.oliverdavies.uk/blog/tags/drupal-8">drupal-8</a>, <a href="https://www.oliverdavies.uk/blog/tags/drupal-planet">drupal-planet</a>, <a href="https://www.oliverdavies.uk/blog/tags/settings.php">settings.php</a> </p>
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<p>Oliver Davies is a Web Developer, System Administrator and Drupal specialist based in the UK. He is a Senior Developer at <a href="https://microserve.io">Microserve</a> and also provides freelance consultancy services for Drupal websites, PHP applications and Linux servers.</p>
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