Common Use Cases

Small Application Or Test Suite

If your configuration already exists in memory, ArrayConfig or config() is enough:

use function FastForward\Config\config;

$config = config([
    'app.name' => 'Console Tool',
    'app.env' => 'dev',
]);

echo $config->get('app.name');

Layering Defaults And Local Overrides

Later sources override earlier ones, which makes environment-specific overrides easy to understand:

use function FastForward\Config\config;

$config = config(
    ['database.host' => 'db.internal', 'database.port' => 3306],
    ['database.host' => '127.0.0.1'],
);

echo $config->get('database.host'); // 127.0.0.1
echo $config->get('database.port'); // 3306

Module-Based Applications

Providers work well when each module or package ships its own configuration:

use function FastForward\Config\configProvider;

$config = configProvider([
    new Core\ConfigProvider(),
    new Blog\ConfigProvider(),
    new Admin\ConfigProvider(),
]);

print_r($config->toArray());

File-Based Projects

If your project already uses a config/ directory, keep that structure and load it directly:

use function FastForward\Config\configDir;

$config = configDir(__DIR__ . '/config', recursive: true);

echo $config->get('mail.transport');

Exposing Config Through PSR-11

Wrap the config object in ConfigContainer when another layer expects container-style access:

use FastForward\Config\Container\ConfigContainer;
use function FastForward\Config\config;

$config = config(__DIR__ . '/config');
$container = new ConfigContainer($config);

echo $container->get('config.database.host');

Production Cache

Use configCache() when you want a PSR-16 cache around the final merged config:

use Psr\SimpleCache\CacheInterface;
use function FastForward\Config\configCache;

/** @var CacheInterface $cache */
$config = configCache($cache, __DIR__ . '/config');

For directory and provider aggregations, you can also use a dedicated cache file. See Caching.