Laravel environment files for local and production possibly not working as intended?

Question

In Laravel 4, I'm setting up my local development machine (my laptop) and then I have my production server.

In my /bootstrap/start.php

$env = $app->detectEnvironment(array(

'local'      => array('MacBook-Pro-2.local'),
'production' => array('ripken'),

));

I then created a .env.local.php in my root directory with the following:

<?php

return [

// Database Connection Settings
'db_host'     => '127.0.0.1',
'db_name'     => 'censored',
'db_user'     => 'censored',
'db_password' => 'censored'

];

That part works. However, I went to my production server and created the same exact file, called it .env.production.php and it doesn't load the variables from that file. I don't know what made me think to do it but I renamed that file .env.php without "production" in the name and it works.

My question therefore is, why wouldn't .env.production.php work? I thought that is what the good folks over at Laravel wanted me to name my various environment files.

Answer 1

Production is the 'default' ruleset, so it is a bit special. Laravel will look for the "base" or "default" rules when loading production, rather than the actual name production.

So you can change

$env = $app->detectEnvironment(array(
'local'      => array('MacBook-Pro-2.local'),
'production' => array('ripken'),
));

to

$env = $app->detectEnvironment(array(
'local'      => array('MacBook-Pro-2.local'),    
));

That way anything that is not "MacBook-Pro-2.local" is going to be production automatically. Then just use the default .env.php for the production settings.

Every other env needs to be explicitly defined - such as .env.local.php and .env.testing.php etc