The baseurl for the Front Controller cannot be set using an ini file and Zend_Application_Resource_FrontController unless a baseurl is specified for all environments. For example, we need to set the baseurl for our production environment, but not for our (multiple) development environments: This works for production, but in development Zend_Application_Resource_FrontController::init() calls $front->setBaseUrl with an empty string (because Zend_Config_Ini relies on parse_ini_file which returns null and false as ""). All the checks in Zend_Controller_Front are for an actual null value and so they assume that we want a baseurl of "" rather than having no baseurl set. I cannot think of a circumstance where we would really want baseurl="", so I suggest that we change Zend_Application_Resource_FrontController::init() to replace with