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I use Laravel 5.0.33 and i have the following folders on my server:

/var/www/laravel_dev/  
/var/www/laravel_stage/  
/var/www/laravel_production/

They each have their own .env file and database, but for some reason each of them sometimes loads the wrong .env file (like once every 100th request).

I figured it loads the wrong .env file because when i dump the env database:

var_dump(env('DB_DATABSE'));

It sometimes return the name of the laravel_production database on the laravel_dev site.

I have made a grep search for the laravel_production database name, and it's not in the dev folder.

I have triede to dump the dir constant (DIR) various places, it's always correct.

Does anyone have an idea what could be wrong, or how i can dig further into what could be wrong?

DalekSall
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2 Answers2

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I recently ran into this problem as well and wanted to share what I learned here since this is one of the top results in a Bing/Google search.

Chances are if you're running into this your running on a multi-threaded web server and it wasn't an issue until there where multiple people hitting the server.

Long story short, using the dotenv package that Laravel uses isn't thread safe. You can see a discussion about it here: https://github.com/vlucas/phpdotenv/issues/76

The quick fix is to run:

artisan config:cache

And I highly recommend adding a comment line to the top of your .env file:

# IMPORTANT! If you change ANYTHING in here make sure to run > artisan config:cache

I hope this helps.

Big_MAC
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It turns out that dotevn is only for development instances of the project. In production the config files have to be hardcoded.

https://github.com/vlucas/phpdotenv

"phpdotenv is made for development environments, and generally should not be used in production. In production, the actual environment variables should be set so that there is no overhead of loading the .env file on each request."

I use git on the production instance, so my solution for the problem is to set the environment variables in each vhost file for each instance i need on the server:

SetEnv DB_DATABASE laravel_stage
SetEnv CACHE_PREFIX  stage

Works like a charm.

DalekSall
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  • It is not that dotenv is for development instances. It is a Environment specific config file. I use it on all my environments and it works like a charm. Is you'r .envfile commited to the git repository? Then is could overwrite on deployment. As stated in the manual it must be excluded from you vcs. The vhosts env works the same way and is a viable sollution for this. The reason for .env is the lower profile to use is. You can edit it through ftp. It requires no special permissions – Niek de Gooijer Jan 20 '16 at 09:52
  • As i state in the question, each instance have their own .env file, and is ofcause excluded from the vc. I added a link to the documentation to be more clear. – DalekSall Jan 20 '16 at 09:55