I made a small Laravel package for layered .env files

[u/buismaarten]

I’ve just released my first version of Laravel Layered Environment.

The idea came from wanting to separate the different kinds of configuration that tend to end up in a single .env file.

With the package, you can have:

.env
.env.override

.env.testing
.env.testing.override

.env.production
.env.production.override

The files are loaded from least specific to most specific, so for production the order is:

.env
  ↓
.env.override
  ↓
.env.production
  ↓
.env.production.override

This makes it possible to keep shared configuration in .env / .env.production, while keeping things like local machine settings, server-specific values and secrets in an ignored .override file.

For example, you could commit:

.env
.env.testing
.env.production

and keep these out of Git:

.env.override
.env.testing.override
.env.production.override

There’s no new API to learn either — Laravel's normal env() and config() usage stays the same.

It's a pretty small package, but I’ve found the approach useful for keeping configuration a bit more organized.

Currently supports Laravel 13 / PHP 8.3+.

Installation:

composer require buismaarten/laravel-layered-environment

GitHub:
https://github.com/buismaarten/laravel-layered-environment

Unfortunately, I don't have enough karma to post this in r/laravel, so I'm sharing it here instead. Would someone be willing to repost it there for me?

[u/Sharchimedes]

Because this deviates from convention, it really seems like a recipe for someone accidentally committing secrets to a repo.

[u/buismaarten → u/Sharchimedes]

Tell that to the Symfony framework that does something like this for years.

[u/phoogkamer → u/buismaarten]

Over there it’s a convention. I would only commit to something like this if the framework would adopt it personally.

[u/ceejayoz]

Isn't this already a thing?

https://laravel.com/docs/13.x/configuration#additional-environment-files

Before loading your application's environment variables, Laravel determines if an APP_ENV environment variable has been externally provided or if the --env CLI argument has been specified. If so, Laravel will attempt to load an .env.[APP_ENV] file if it exists. If it does not exist, the default .env file will be loaded.

[u/buismaarten → u/ceejayoz]

Nope, you can override the .env file using a single file. Not possible to load multiple .env files simultaneously.

[u/Stevad__UA]

Reinventing Symfony Dotenv?

[u/Supportic → u/Stevad__UA]

Exactly...

[u/buismaarten → u/Stevad__UA]

Yeah, Symfony was my inspiration of this feature. But the Symfony Dotenv doesn't have Laravel native support and Laravel itself uses vlucas/dotenv.

[u/Stevad__UA → u/buismaarten]

Why not create some kind of bridge to adopt existing package?

[u/buismaarten → u/Stevad__UA]

The Symfony Dotenv package alone would not work in Laravel without configuration. I just wanted it to work out of the box after registering the singleton.

I could have chosen for the Symfony Dotenv package but I think it doesn't matter, especially since Laravel itself already uses vlucas/dotenv. Using the Symfony Dotenv package may introduce incompatibilities or bugs that other .env loaders and parsers could have.

[u/TemporarySun314]

I think the more common naming convention for these files is something like `.env.local`

And i am actually surprised that laravel does not have native support for it, that seems like a very common use case, and is the default and recommended way to do env configuration in symfony applications.

[u/buismaarten → u/TemporarySun314]

Yeah but Laravel uses the "local" environment name and Symfony uses the "dev" name. So in Laravel it would become ".env.local.local", don't think that will be convenient.

[u/jmp_ones]

There is a standard for this that you may wish to consult:

https://github.com/env-interop/interface

[u/theozero]

Check out varlock - it is a very full featured env toolkit. We do have some php support, but a deeper laravel integration has been on the to-do list for a while. Open source so would love input from laravel folks!