What’s the recommended way to set the site URL?

Question

There are multiple ways to set the site URL. What is the recommended way?

Answer 1

As of Craft 2, you should be using the new siteUrl config setting.

---

There are two advantages to setting your site URL using this config setting.

First, The value can be set on a per-locale basis, in a way where Craft is actually aware of all locales’ URLs on every request (unlike the CRAFT_SITE_URL constant, where Craft only knows the current locale’s URL). That’s a good thing because it means you can easily link to entries’ URLs across different locales, for example.

return array(

    'siteUrl' => array(
        'en_us' => 'http://example.com/',
        'de'    => 'http://example.com/de/',
    ),

    // ...

);

Its value can also be set directly on a per-environment basis. (Yes you can achieve this using the environmentVariables config setting combined with a {siteUrl} tag inside the Site URL setting within the CP’s general settings, but that’s much less direct/obvious.)

return array(

    '.dev' => array(
        'siteUrl' => 'http://example.dev/',
        // ...
    ),

    '.com' => array(
        'siteUrl' => 'http://example.com/',
        // ...
    ),

    // ...
);

Those of course can be combined as well:

return array(

    '.dev' => array(
        'siteUrl' => array(
            'en_us' => 'http://example.dev/',
            'de'    => 'http://example.dev/de/',
        ),
        // ...
    ),

    '.com' => array(
        'siteUrl' => array(
            'en_us' => 'http://example.com/',
            'de'    => 'http://example.com/de/',
        ),
        // ...
    ),

    // ...

);