Laravel Configuration – The PHP Framework

In the previous post, we have seen that the installation of Laravel and overview of laravel . In this post, let us discuss the categories included in the configuration.

Environment Configuration

Environment variables are those which provide a list of web services to your web application. All the environment variables are declared in the .env file which includes the parameters required for initializing the configuration.

By default, the .env file includes following parameters −

APP_ENV = local
APP_KEY=base64:seNPF4sXYZ3aPnT/OV9luVna4ndymRrDySUYWrqCXz8=
APP_DEBUG = true
APP_URL = http://localhost
DB_CONNECTION = mysql
DB_HOST = 127.0.0.1
DB_PORT = 3306
DB_DATABASE = laravel_db
DB_USERNAME = root
DB_PASSWORD = 

CACHE_DRIVER = file
QUEUE_CONNECTION=sync
SESSION_DRIVER = file

REDIS_HOST = 127.0.0.1
REDIS_PASSWORD = null
REDIS_PORT = 6379

MAIL_DRIVER = smtp
MAIL_HOST = mailhog
MAIL_PORT=1025
MAIL_USERNAME = null
MAIL_PASSWORD = null
MAIL_ENCRYPTION = null

Important Points

While working with basic configuration files of Laravel, the following points are to be noted −

The .env file should not be committed to the application source control, since each developer or user has some predefined environment configuration for the web application.
For backup options, the development team should include the .env.example file, which should contain the default configuration.

Retrieval of Environment Variables

All the environment variables declared in the .env file can be accessed by env-helper functions which will call the respective parameter. These variables are also listed into $_ENV global variable whenever application receives a request from the user end. You can access the environment variable as shown below −

'env' => env('APP_ENV', 'production'),

env-helper functions are called in the app.php file included in the config folder. The above given example is calling for the basic local parameter.

Accessing Configuration Values

You can easily access the configuration values anywhere in the application using the global config helper function. In case if the configuration values are not initialized, default values are returned.

For example, to set the default time zone, the following code is used −

config(['app.timezone' => 'Asia/Kolkata']);

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