phpengine/specs/integrations/encrypted-config.md

Read this when changing configuration encoding, runtime loading, backup behavior, or administrator configuration access.

Encoded Configuration Files

Implementing Files

File	Key symbols
index.php	LoadEncryptedConfig('cfg/config.bin') during bootstrap
src/Core/System/RuntimeServices.php	LoadEncryptedConfig, Encrypt, Decrypt
src/Core/Api/AdminController.php	Admin read/save and backup restoration
cfg/config.ini.example	Tracked placeholder template for local configuration
cfg/config.ini	Ignored local plaintext configuration, potentially containing credentials

Flow

1. Bootstrap checks the PHP version and asks RuntimeServices to load cfg/config.bin.
2. The utility decodes it to a temporary file, calls F3 config(), then deletes the temporary file.
3. Deployment tooling provisions cfg/config.bin before bootstrap; no configuration-generation script is tracked.
4. An administrator can read plaintext through the API or submit replacement text.
5. Save renames the prior runtime config to .old, writes the encoded replacement, and restores the backup if writing fails.

Trust Boundaries

Boundary	Mechanism	Location
Runtime config presence	Bootstrap throws when the required file is absent	RuntimeServices::LoadEncryptedConfig()
Sensitive config disclosure	Numeric permission ID 1 required before reading plaintext	AdminController::load()
Sensitive config mutation	Numeric permission ID 1 and CSRF validation required	AdminController::save()
Partial replacement failure	Backup rename and restore attempt after write failure	AdminController::saveConfiguration()
Local config source	Placeholder template is copied to an ignored local file	cfg/config.ini.example

Config

• Runtime file: cfg/config.bin.
• Backup file: cfg/config.bin.old.
• Encoding: base64_encode(gzcompress()); decoding is gzuncompress(base64_decode()).
• The encoding is reversible; it is not a confidentiality mechanism.

See configuration spec and commands.