Settings

A look behind the scenes of implementing deferred writes in the CodeIgniter 4 Settings package: how batching write operations improves performance, and the subtle database portability issue caused by NULL values in unique constraints.

While CodeIgniter 4 Settings includes a database-backed handler, I wanted a file-based option that’s lightweight, fast, and safe for production use. I’ll walk through the challenges of handling concurrency, file locking, and caching, and explain the design choices behind the new FileHandler.