The humble .env file is a useful and low-tech way of storing persistent environment variables. Drop the file on your server and let your PHP scripts consume it with glee. But consume it how? There are lots of excellent parsing libraries for PHP. But isn’t there a simpler way? Yes! You can use PHP’s parse_ini_file() function and it works. But… .env and .ini have subtly different behaviour which …
If you can drop a
.envfile on a server. You can drop a well formed.inifile instead. I don’t see any reason to ever parse a env file as a ini file.Also I don’t understand why we need to have a .env file in the first place when config file exists and best practice to pass on secret is not with .env file anyway.
TLDR:
You should
probablyuse a proper parser rather than hoping your .env looks enough like an .ini to pass muster.You can probably use a butter knife instead of a flat screwdriver but just do your job properly.
