Environment variables returning blank.

I wanted to provide you all an update. Forge does not currently map the environment variables to the new environment file format (.env, not .env.php like before). You'll need to manually create/upload your .env file for the time being.

I ran into this issue today. I tried everything I could think of, but the result was always the same. Laravel wasn't reading the variables. Interestingly enough, I was able to echo variables in Blade. {{ env('DB_HOST') }} would give the value of the environment variable set in the admin in Forge. It's just that those settings were not working in the database.php file, even though were set correct. I could even look at the Nginx config in Forge and they were being set. Something is messed up in L5.

Hello, try to put the following code in start.php

$env = $app->detectEnvironment( function(){
    try {
        if (($env = getenv('APP_ENV')) === false) {
            $dotenv = new Dotenv\Dotenv(__DIR__.'/../');
            $dotenv->load();
            $env = getenv('APP_ENV');
        }
        return $env;
    } catch (Exception $e) {
        return 'local';    
    }
});

reference: https://alfrednutile.info/posts/113