Short-hand PHP Dotenv instantiation

Aug 15, 2016 php

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I’m a big fan of PHP DotEnv for creating my environment variables for my scripts. (It’s always a good thing to keep your passwords and credentials separate from your source code, according to OWASP).

Now, this is kind of nit-picky, but I never liked the instructions from phpdotenv on how to initialize their code. This is what they say to do:

$dotenv = new Dotenv\Dotenv(__DIR__);
$dotenv->load();

Ok - so that’s not that big of a deal. But, since programmers are lazy and we like to make things even quicker, I decided to use one of PHP 5.4’s new features in my code: Class member access on instantiation.

Now, my PHP code looks super simple - just like this:

(new Dotenv\Dotenv(__DIR__))->load();