Laravel 5 & Forge Environmental Variables (PDO Exception)

I'm getting extremely frustrated with Laravel 5 deployment... Things seem to work fine if I install and follow the instructions according to the Forge tutorial on here.

However, due to my particular needs of running wordpress alongside my laravel project, I wanted to split up the site like this:

Place the laravel app under /home/default/app/

Place the wordpress installation under the default directory, or /home/default/

Therefore I manually SSH'd into the server, and cloned my directory into /home/default/app/

And I then updated the Laravel Forge deployment script to this:

cd /home/forge/default/app/
git pull origin master
composer install --no-interaction --no-dev --prefer-dist
php artisan migrate --force

This is the error I am receiving when trying auto-deploy:

[PDOException]                                                                     
  SQLSTATE[HY000] [1045] Access denied for user ''@'localhost' (using password: NO)  
                  

I set the environmental variables in Forge. My .env file is not uploaded to the repository... (included in .gitignore)

Assuming that it were, here is my .env file (which I strongly believe is not on my server):

APP_ENV=local
APP_DEBUG=true
APP_KEY=SomeRandomString

DB_HOST=localhost
DB_DATABASE=scheduleify
DB_USERNAME=root
DB_PASSWORD=secret

CACHE_DRIVER=file
SESSION_DRIVER=file
QUEUE_DRIVER=sync

My database.php entries for the MYSQL server:

    'mysql' => [
            'driver'    => 'mysql',
            'host'      => env('DB_HOST'),
            'database'  => env('DB_DATABASE'),
            'username'  => env('DB_USERNAME'),
            'password'  => env('DB_PASSWORD'),
            'charset'   => 'utf8',
            'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
            'prefix'    => '',
            'strict'    => false,
        ],

The Environmental Variable names in Forge:

DB_HOST
DB_USERNAME
DB_PASSWORD
DB_DATABASE

EDIT: Additional Information

Running the getenv command:

Current application environment: production

However, trying to get the environmental variables via php artisan tinker through SSH (is my syntax right?) reveals:

>>> env('DB_HOST');
=> null

Is there any way to diagnose what's wrong? Is there something I missed? Should I un-install the repository in Forge?