Once you start developing an application you’ll want to launch it in different contexts: in a production context the configuration must be optimized for speed and security while in a development context debugging capabilities and convenience are more important. Flow supports the notion of contexts which allow for bundling configuration for different purposes. Each Flow request acts in exactly one context. However, it is possible to use the same installation on the same server in distinct contexts by accessing it through a different host name, port or passing special arguments.

Why do I want contexts?

Imagine your application is running on a live server and your customer reports a bug. No matter how hard you try, you can’t reproduce the issue on your local development server. Now contexts allow you to enter the live application on the production server in a development context without anyone noticing – both contexts run in parallel. This effectively allows you to debug an application in its realistic environment (although you still should do the actual development on a dedicated machine …).

An additional use for context is the simplified staging of your application. You’ll want almost the same configuration on your production and your development server - but not exactly the same. The live environment will surely access a different database or might require other authentication methods. What you do in this case is sharing most of the configuration and define the difference in dedicated contexts.

Flow provides configuration for the Production and Development context. In the standard distribution a reasonable configuration is defined for each context:

  • In the Production context all caches are enabled, logging is reduced to a minimum and only generic, friendly error messages are displayed to the user (more detailed descriptions end up in the log).
  • In Development context caches are active but a smart monitoring service flushes caches automatically if PHP code or configuration has been altered. Error messages and exceptions are displayed verbosely and additional aids are given for effective development.


If Flow throws some strange errors at you after you made code changes, make sure to either manually flush the cache or run the application in Development context - because caches are not flushed automatically in Production context.

The configuration for each context is located in directories of the same name:

Context Configurations

Directory Description
Configuration/ Global configuration, for all contexts
Configuration/Development/ Configuration for the Development context
Configuration/Production/ Configuration for the Production context


Setting Up Context with Virtual Host and change Context from «Development» to «Production» is explained in the previous chapter «Installation».

One thing you certainly need to adjust is the database configuration. Aside from that Flow should work fine with the default configuration delivered with the distribution. However, there are many switches you can adjust: specify another location for logging, select a faster cache backend and much more.

The easiest way to find out which options are available is taking a look at the default configuration of the Flow package and other packages. The respective files are located in Packages/Framework/<packageKey>/Configuration/. Don’t modify these files directly but rather copy the setting you’d like to change and insert it into a file within the global or context configuration directories.

Flow uses the YAML format [1] for its configuration files. If you never edited a YAML file, there are two things you should know at least:

  • Indentation has a meaning: by different levels of indentation, a structure is defined.
  • Spaces, not tabs: you must indent with exactly 2 spaces per level, don’t use tabs.

More detailed information about Flow’s configuration management can be found in the Reference Manual.


If you’re running Flow on a Windows machine, you do have to make some adjustments to the standard configuration because it will cause problems with long paths and filenames. By default Flow caches files within the Data/Temporary/<Context>/Caches/ directory whose absolute path can eventually become too long for Windows.

To avoid errors you should change the cache configuration so it points to a location with a very short absolute file path, for example C:\\tmp\\. Do that by setting the FLOW_PATH_TEMPORARY_BASE environment variable - For example in the virtual host part of your Apache configuration:


<VirtualHost ...>
        SetEnv FLOW_PATH_TEMPORARY_BASE "C\\:tmp\\"


Parsing the YAML configuration files takes a bit of time which remarkably slows down the initialization of Flow. That’s why all configuration is cached by default when Flow is running in Production context. Because this cache cannot be cleared automatically it is important to know that changes to any configuration file won’t have any effect until you manually flush the respective caches.

To avoid any hassle we recommend that you stay in Development context throughout this tutorial.

Database Setup

Before you can store anything, you need to set up a database and tell Flow how to access it. The credentials and driver options need to be specified in the global Flow settings.


You should make it a habit to specify database settings in context-specific configuration files. This makes sure your functional tests will never accidentally truncate your production database. The same line of thought makes sense for other options as well, e.g. mail server settings.

After you have created an empty database and set up a user with sufficient access rights, copy the file Configuration/Development/Settings.yaml.example to Configuration/Development/Settings.yaml. Open and adjust the file to your needs - for a common MySQL setup, it would look similar to this:


      dbname: 'gettingstarted'
      user: 'myuser'
      password: 'mypassword'

For global settings and Production context, the relevant files would be directly in Configuration respectively Configuration/Production`.`



If you configured everything correctly, the following command will create the initial table structure needed by Flow:

$ ./flow doctrine:migrate
Migrating up to 2011xxxxxxxxxx from 0

++ migrating 20110613223837
        -> CREATE TABLE flow_resource_resourcepointer (hash VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, PRIMARY
        -> CREATE TABLE flow_resource_resource (persistence_object_identifier VARCHAR(40)



++ finished in 4.97
++ 5 migrations executed
++ 28 sql queries

Environment Variables

Some specific flow behaviour can also be configured with a couple of environment variables.

Variable Description
FLOW_ROOTPATH Can be used to override the path to the Flow root.
FLOW_CONTEXT Use to set the flow context (see above).
FLOW_PATH_TEMPORARY_BASE Can be used to set a path for temporary data.
Use to specify the html page shown when the site is locked.
This is relative to the Packages directory.
FLOW_ONLY_COMPOSER_LOADER Set to true (1) to only use composer autoloader.

[1]YAML Ain’t Markup Language