Environments

You may want to change how your application behaves on a production server than on a local development machine. For example, you should display all PHP errors when developing your app but you should turn off error display to end users when your application goes live.

.env

Lightpack ships with a sample configuration file where some pre-defined environment configurations are available for your reference.

When you install Lightpack, it creates a .env file in the root directory of your project. This file contains a set of environment variables that you can use as a template for your own environment variables.

You can also generate the .env file from command line itself.

php console create:env

You should not commit your .env file to your version control system. Keep it in .gitignore.

.env format

The .env file uses a simple KEY=VALUE format:

APP_ENV=production
APP_DEBUG=false
DB_HOST=localhost
DB_PORT=3306
DB_NAME=myapp

Comments

You can add comments using the # symbol:

# Database configuration
DB_HOST=localhost
DB_PORT=3306

Special values

The following special values are automatically converted:

APP_DEBUG=true      # Converted to boolean true
APP_DEBUG=false     # Converted to boolean false

Variable interpolation

You can reference other environment variables using ${VAR} syntax:

DB_HOST=localhost
DB_URL=mysql://${DB_HOST}:3306/myapp

get_env()

To access environment configurations, call get_env() function.

get_env('APP_ENV', 'development');

This function takes two arguments. First is the environment variable name and second is the default value in case it does not find that environment variable.

set_env()

This function sets an environment variable at runtime.

set_env('APP_VERSION', 'v1.0');

Changes made with set_env() only affect the current request. They are not persisted to the .env file.

Using in configuration

Environment variables are commonly used in configuration files:

// config/database.php
return [
    'database' => [
        'host' => get_env('DB_HOST', 'localhost'),
        'port' => get_env('DB_PORT', '3306'),
        'name' => get_env('DB_NAME', 'myapp'),
    ],
];

This allows you to change configuration based on the environment without modifying code.

Environment-specific behavior

You can use environment variables to change application behavior:

if (get_env('APP_ENV') === 'production') {
    // Production-specific code
    ini_set('display_errors', 'off');
} else {
    // Development-specific code
    ini_set('display_errors', 'on');
}