So you're all excited to try out ZF2. You clone the skeleton, install some modules, maybe even follow Rob Allen's excellent ZF2 tutorial, and finally, start building your application. Now, if you're a former ZF1 user or refugee from another framework, you might be troubled at this point by the fact that, at first glance, ZF2 doesn't appear to take into consideration environment-specific configuration values (e.g., development, testing, staging, production). Luckily, this is not the case!

He includes a bit of sample code showing how you can use a simple getenv call to pull in the value from an "APPLICATION_ENV" environment variable and put it into an autoload path.