Calling environment variables inside class not working

Question

I'm not sure why this isn't working? I want to be able to access the constants set in my .env.php file but NetBeans is showing an error stating that the getenv function isn't recognized.

Here is my code

<?php 

class Blah extends Eloquent {
...
protected $connection = getenv('DB_NAME');
}

Answer 1

Set the class values from the constructor.

class Blah extends Eloquent
{
    protected $connection = null;

    function __construct() {
        $this->connection = getenv('DB_NAME');
    }
}