Attention

TYPO3 v7 has reached its end-of-life November 30th, 2018 and is not maintained by the community anymore. Looking for a stable version? Use the version switch on the top left.

There is no further ELTS support. It is recommended that you upgrade your project and use a supported version of TYPO3.

Configuration options

In the ext_conf_template.txt file configuration options for an extension can be defined. They will be accessible in the TYPO3 backend from the Extension Manager.

There's a specific syntax to declare these options properly, which is similar to the one used for TypoScript constants (see Declaring constants for the Constant editor).

This syntax applies to the comment line that should be placed just before the constant. Consider the following example (taken from system extension "rsaauth"):

# cat=basic/enable; type=string; label=Path to the temporary directory:This directory will contain...
temporaryDirectory =

First a category (cat) is defined ("basic") with the subcategory "enable". Then a type is given ("string") and finally a label, which is itself split (on the colon ":") into a title and a description (this should actually be a localized string). The above example will be rendered like this in the EM:

Configuration screen for the rsaauth extension

The configuration tab displays all options from a single category. A selector is available to switch between categories. Inside an option screen, options are grouped by subcategory. At the bottom of the screenshot, the label – split between header and description – is visible. Then comes the field itself, in this case an input, because the option's type is "string".

Once you saved the configuration in the ExtensionManager, it will be stored in $GLOBALS['TYPO3_CONF_VARS']['EXT']['extConf']['your_extension_key'] as a serialized array.

To fetch the value of temporaryDirectory from the example above, you could simply use:

$extensionConfiguration = unserialize($GLOBALS['TYPO3_CONF_VARS']['EXT']['extConf']['your_extension_key']);
$temporaryDirectory = $extensionConfiguration['temporaryDirectory'];

Or even better use the API to get the information merged with the default settings if the settings have not been saved yet:

/** @var \TYPO3\CMS\Extensionmanager\Utility\ConfigurationUtility $configurationUtility */
$configurationUtility = $this->objectManager->get('TYPO3\CMS\Extensionmanager\Utility\ConfigurationUtility');
$extensionConfiguration = $configurationUtility->getCurrentConfiguration('themes');

You can also define nested options using the TypoScript notation:

directories {
   # cat=basic/enable; type=string; label=Path to the temporary directory
   tmp =
   # cat=basic/enable; type=string; label=Path to the cache directory
   cache =
}

This will result in a multidimensional array:

$extensionConfiguration = unserialize($GLOBALS['TYPO3_CONF_VARS']['EXT']['extConf']['your_extension_key']);
$extensionConfiguration['directories.']['tmp']
$extensionConfiguration['directories.']['cache']

Important

Notice the dot at the end of the directories key. This notation must be used for every grouping key and is a convention of the TypoScript parser.