Introduction
Laravel Forge makes it easy to manage environment variables for your sites. If your project contains a.env file, you can easily create and edit environment variables from the “Environment” tab of your site’s settings.
If Laravel Forge detects a
.env.example file in your project, it will automatically copy this and replace some of the settings to match your server’s database settings during site creation.An empty .env.example file could result in an empty environment file on the first deployment of your site.Modifying environment variables
To modify your site’s environment variables, navigate to your site’s “Settings” panel and click on the “Environment” sidebar item. When you modify environment variables through Forge, the changes are written directly to the.env file within your application. If you’re using zero-downtime deployments, this file will be symlinked into the current release directory, ensuring your environment configuration is consistent across deployments.
After modifying your environment variables, you can optionally choose to automatically run:
- php artisan config:cache - Caches your configuration files for improved performance.
- php artisan queue:restart - Gracefully restarts your queue workers to pick up the new environment values.
Encrypted environment files
Laravel Forge provides support for Laravel’s encrypted environment files without requiring you to include your encryption key within your deployment script. To leverage this feature, add your encryption key to the “Encrypted environment files” section of your site’s “Environment” tab. Once added, Laravel Forge will inject the value into theLARAVEL_ENV_ENCRYPTION_KEY environment variable during deployments, allowing you to add the env:decrypt Artisan command to your deployment script without needing to specify the --key option manually.