Environment Variables

Laravel applications use .env file or an environment configuration to store and manage essential and usually unchanging settings such as database server credentials and mail provider. This elliminates the inconvenience of having to change the configuration file directly which may break future updates.

Read More: https://laravel.com/docs/5.4/configuration#environment-configuration

Populate the .env file at the root of the application folder with your server's configuration. Below is a snippet of the default configuration. The variables are explained in the succeeding sections.

APP_NAME=CPDTrack
APP_ENV=production
APP_DEBUG=false
APP_URL=http://localhost

Application

Variable	Default	Description
APP_NAME	CPDTrack	Application name, contain inside quotation marks if exceeds two words
APP_ENV	production	Environment setting
APP_DEBUG	false	Enable debugging
APP_URL	http://localhost	Base URL of your application

For production, it is recommended that APP_ENV and APP_DEBUG be left as default as it may expose confidential information and compromise the application.

Database

Consult with your database administrator for the following credentials.

Variable	Default	Description
DB_DATABASE	cpdtrack	Database name
DB_USERNAME	root	Database username
DB_PASSWORD		Database password
DB_PORT	3306	Database server port

The application's database structure is created with MySQL and therefore uses features that are native to MySQL and MariaDB alone.

Mail

The application uses emails to send notifications and therefore required a working mail server.

Variable	Default
MAIL_DRIVER	smtp
MAIL_HOST	smtp.mailtrap.io
MAIL_PORT	2525
MAIL_USERNAME	secret
MAIL_PASSWORD	secret
MAIL_ENCRYPTION	tls