Best place to store constants shared by multiple Controllers?

If you feel Config is costing you performance, you can try using the php artisan config:cache command. This will create a cache of your config, which means it's basically just loading an array (I believe) from a static file, which should be about as fast as possible. Also, you can use the Config facade or the config('app.something') helper function in order to access the value you want.

@ahuggins I believe in Lumen config just loads the value from .env file, equivalent to env('key'). I would prefer to store those shared constants in some file that is version controlled.

i have mine in a constants fiel within the config folder, then just use the config('..')to load them etc

constants.php

return [
    'MY_CONST_VALUE' => 'value',
    ];

Called like the following:

    $whatsMyValue = config('constants.MY_CONST_VALUE);

@simondavies Did you enable facade or do something else? When I did exactly the same as you did, then

echo $whatsMyValue;

I get nothing.

@zhiyong should not have to all config files get loaded in, post your actual code, to help, where you putting this etc

@simondavies I thought config() will automatically look for constants.php under /config folder. I guess I need to load this file manually in compose.

I would recommend you load constants as php constants in the Lumen bootstrap. You don't have store them in arrays.

I personally like to create a file called "constants.php" somewhere under the project tree then autoload it using composer. For example:

"autoload": {
    "files": [
        "src/App/constants.php"
    ]
}