For me it works with configuration.php without a problem last time (a week ago) I checked it

Hi Robert,

I took down a copy of the master ZIP last night and went through the install on my local windows machine and went through the instructions but after renaming to configuration.php the install.php cli file couldn't find the install SQL file and was always going to this line:
throw new UnexpectedValueException(sprintf('Install SQL file for %s not found in (' . JPATH_ROOT . '/sql/' . $dbType . '.sql' . ').', $dbType));

The issue there was the $dbType variable was empty but I didn't know why just yet.

So I imported the SQL file manually instead and then opened up the web interface and that's when I got a more descriptive error from Joomla mentioning that it couldn't select the database to the page's first query.

So I did a little debugging and figured out the entire JConfig object was empty and since I noticed the instructions seemed a little different than normal (the dist file was named "config.dist.php" instead of "configuration.dist.php" as it normally is) I figured that might be the issue and renamed my real configuration file to "config.php" instead and then it started picking up my configuration settings properly.

That's an odd one indeed. I've had a configuration.php file since day one without issue. The web classes by default look for a configuration.php file, and I've not overridden that method, so I'm thoroughly confused why configuration.php isn't working for you but config.php is.

I think the issue is this:
JFactory looks for a file JPATH_PLATFORM/config.php per default - so this is the one that is picked up in your case assuming that your config.php file lives in the libraries folder.

Now the application is looking for a file named configuration.php in the root of the directory tree.

So yes, we need to change the instructions and I would also recommend to move the config.example.php from the libraries folder to the root, or update the readme to do so ;)

I ended up leaving my configuration.php in the libraries folder since that's where the dist file was located, normally I would have placed it in the root directory, but since each JPlatform can be configured a little differently I figured I'd leave it in the same folder it currently was, but I guess if I had simply moved mine into the root folder it would have worked as well.

Thanks for the additional info Nikolai!

I ended up moving the sample file and instructions in the README, so all should be well now.

@mbabker You are the best