Laravel not reading changes to .env file

From the official Laravel 5.2 Upgrade Notes:

If you are using the config:cache command during deployment, you must make sure that you are only calling the env function from within your configuration files, and not from anywhere else in your application.

If you are calling env from within your application, it is strongly recommended you add proper configuration values to your configuration files and call env from that location instead, allowing you to convert your env calls to config calls.

Reference: https://laravel.com/docs/5.2/upgrade#upgrade-5.2.0

For me it has worked this in this order:

php artisan config:cache
php artisan config:clear
php artisan cache:clear

And I've tried all the rests without luck.

Wow. Good grief. It's because I had an env value with a space in it, not surrounded by quotes

This

SITE_NAME=My website

Changed to this

SITE_NAME="My website"

Fixed it. I think this had to do with Laravel 5.2 now upgrading vlucas/phpdotenv from 1.1.1 to 2.1.0

You can solve the problem by the following recommendation

Recommendation 1:

You have to use the .env file through configuration files, that means you are requrested to read the .env file from configuration files (such as /config/app.php or /config/database.php), then you can use the configuration files from any location of your project.

Recommendation 2: Set your env value within double quotation

 GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID="887557629-9h6n4ne.apps.googleusercontent.com"
 GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET="YT2ev2SpJt_Pa3dit60iFJ"
 GOOGLE_MAP="AIzaSyCK6RWwql0DucT7Sl43w9ma-k8qU"

Recommendation 3: Maintain the following command sequence after changing any configuration or env value.

 composer dump-autoload
 composer dump-autoload -o

 php artisan clear-compiled
 php artisan optimize

 php artisan route:clear
 php artisan view:clear

 php artisan cache:clear
 php artisan config:cache
 php artisan config:clear

Recommendation 4: When the syntax1 is not working then you can try another syntax2

   $val1 = env('VARIABLE_NAME');     // syntax1
   $val2 = getenv('VARIABLE_NAME');  // syntax2
   echo 'systax1 value is:'.$val1.' & systax2 value is:'.$val2;

Recommendation 5: When your number of users is high/more then you have to increase the related memory size in the server configuration.

Recommendation 6: Set a default probable value when you are reading .env variable.

 $googleClinetId=env("GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID","889159-9h6n95f1e.apps.googleusercontent.com");
 $googleSecretId=env("GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID","YT2evBCt_Pa3dit60iFJ");
 $googleMap=env("GOOGLE_MAP","AIzaSyCK6RUl0T7Sl43w9ma-k8qU");

I had a similar issue in my config/services.php and I solved using config clear and optimize commands:

php artisan config:clear
php artisan optimize

I missed this in the upgrade instructions:

Add an env configuration option to your app.php configuration file that looks like the following: 'env' => env('APP_ENV', 'production')

Adding this line got the local .env file to be read in correctly.

I had the same issue on local environment, I resolved by

1. php artisan config:clear
2. php artisan config:cache
3. and then cancelling php artisan serve command, and restart again.

Same thing happens when :port is in your local .env

again the double quotes does the trick

APP_URL="http://localhost:8000"

and then

php artisan config:clear

I know this is super old, but today I discovered another reason why my .env was not loaded:

• I had a (commited) .env.local
• I recently switched APP_ENV from dev to local

With L8 (and maybe before), what happens is that it tries to find .env.<APP_ENV> and if it finds it, uses it.

Fun fact: in my case, .env.local was a blue-print file with non-sensitive information and not meant to be directly used, but that's what happened.

Removing the .env.local led to Laravel looking for .env instead.

In my case laravel 5.7 env('APP_URL') not work but config('app.url') works. If I add new variable to env and to config - it not works - but after php artisan config:cache it start works.

Also additional to what @andrewtweber suggested make sure that you don't have spaces between the KEY= and the value unless it is between quotes

.env file e.g.:

...
SITE_NAME= My website
MAIL_PORT= 587
MAIL_FROM_NAME= websitename
...

to:

...
SITE_NAME="My website"
MAIL_PORT=587
MAIL_FROM_NAME=websitename
...

if you did call config:cache during local development, you can undo this by deleting the bootstrap/cache/config.php file. and this is work for me.

I experienced this. Reason was that apache(user www-data) could not read .env due to file permissions. So i changed the file permissions to ensure that the server (apache) had read permissions to the file. Just that and boom, it was all working now!
Update:
How to do this varies, depending on who owns the .env file, but assuming it belongs to the Apache www-data group, you can do this:

sudo chmod g+r .env

Modify it depending on your permission structure.

I solved this problem generating a new key using the command: php artisan key:generate

For anyone encountering issues with Laravel Valet where php artisan does not reflect updated .env variable values, consider using a unique naming convention for your environment variables as a workaround.

For instance, instead of using the default DB_USERNAME, rename it to DATABASE_USERNAME or another distinctive name. The root cause of the issue, where php artisan tinker still displays outdated values even after executing the commands:

php artisan cache:clear
php artisan config:clear
php artisan view:clear

is unclear. This workaround can help bypass the problem by ensuring your application references uniquely named environment variables, potentially avoiding conflicts or caching issues with commonly used names.

refer: https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/general-discussion/env-not-reading-variables-sometimes

In my case, I needed to restart my Supervisord jobs (i.e. my queue workers). After doing so, a new environment variable I had added to my .env file was successfully pulled into my application.

Remember, queue workers, are long-lived processes and store the booted application state in memory. As a result, they will not notice changes in your code base after they have been started. So, during your deployment process, be sure to restart your queue workers. In addition, remember that any static state created or modified by your application will not be automatically reset between jobs.

Source: Official Laravel Docs - Queues

If you've come here because you have multiple .env.* files and php artisan config:cache resulted in incorrect settings, it's because it (tried to) read the .env file and not the one specific to your environment. Try this instead (where CODE corresponds to .env.CODE):

APP_ENV=CODE php artisan config:cache

if you did call config:cache during local development, you can undo this by deleting the bootstrap/cache/config.php file. and this is work for me.

@Payal Pandav has given the comment above.

I want to tell a simple workaround. Just edit the config.php file in the bootstrap/cache/ folder. And change the credentials. This worked for me. Please don't delete this file since this may contain other crucial data in the production environment.

In my case I was using VSCODE and it turned out my .env file was auto-dectected by the IDE as a shell script file and not an Ini which was causing me the issue. It's a rare occurrence, but I hope it will save someone time.

For Laravel coder. We can use config() to solve this problem

in file "config/app.php":

'same_url' => env('SAME_URL', 'http://localhost'),

in your code base:

$sameURL = config('app.same_url').'/orders/';

For those who run their php application in Docker it might help to run config:clear and then restart the container, so the worker processes restart as well (if they're configured to run inside the same container as the application)

Config clearing didn't work for me. I found that Laravel was prioritizing OS env variables over the .env file. Somehow, APP_ENV was added to OS (MacOS), and inside Laravel, the value of env('APP_ENV') was always local.

Unset OS variables (bash MacOS):

unset APP_ENV
unset APP_KEY
...

Edit: That was not the case. This issue only happened in the VSCode terminal. I disabled all the extensions and removed unnecessary ones and the problem was fixed.

Just wanna let you know in case of a database issue around .env file not being read, my solution for a "Database connection failure":

Reason in my case was that my password generator gave me a # as one of the passwords characters, which led to ignored parts of the password. Put the password in double quotes and you're fine.

I made the mistake by doing dd/die/dump in the index.php file. This causes the system to not regenerate the configs.

Just do dump in view files will do. The changes to .env file update instantly.

I had some problems with this. It seemed to be a file permission issue somewhere in the app - not the .env-file.

I had to - stop my docker - use chown to set owning-rights to my own user for the whole project - start docker again

This time it worked.

If you're using sail environment right after you change your environment variable just restart a server, otherwise it's going to show the old value.

In my case (Laravel 7.x) it happen because I had set environmental variable on server. To be precise in Docker container. And because environments variables are higher priority than .env file, nothing changes during .env file edit.

Check if you set the env variable on the server:

echo $VAR_NAME