Laravel 5: Retrieving Environment Variables With env

The env helper function is used to retrieve the value of an environment variable. You may supply a $default value to be returned if there is no value currently set for the provided $key.

#Signature

The signature of the env function is:

1function env(
2    $key,
3    $default = null
4);

#Example Use

The following examples will use the following .env environment file:

 1APP_ENV=local
 2APP_DEBUG=true
 3APP_KEY=SomeRandomString
 4
 5DB_HOST=localhost
 6DB_DATABASE=homestead
 7DB_USERNAME=homestead
 8DB_PASSWORD=secret
 9
10CACHE_DRIVER=file
11SESSION_DRIVER=file
12
13TEST_TRUE1=true
14TEST_TRUE2=(true)
15
16TEST_FALSE1=false
17TEST_FALSE2=(false)
18
19TEST_NULL1=null
20TEST_NULL2=(null)
21
22TEST_EMPTY1=empty
23TEST_EMPTY2=(empty)

The returned value will appear above the function call as a comment (the actual values returned will likely be different based on application specifics and environment configuration):

1// local
2$valueOne = env('APP_ENV');
3 
4// true
5$valueTwo = env('APP_DEBUG');
6 
7// A rather long default value
8$valueThree = env('NonExistent', 'A rather long default value');

The env function will automatically convert boolean string representations and null representations into their corresponding PHP value. In the above example configuration file, the values returned for TEST_TRUE1, TEST_TRUE2, TEST_FALSE1 and TEST_FALSE2 will automatically be converted to a boolean type. The values returned for TEST_NULL1 and TEST_NULL2 will automatically be converted to a null type. The values returned for TEST_EMPTY1 and TEST_EMPTY2 will actually be an empty string, with a length of 0.

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