Laravel intermittently does not pull from environment variables correctly

Never had an issue yet personally in local dev on windows and mac or production on various hosts. Weird.. I always take the defaults out though.

I had the same issue,recently I got updates from Laravel, now issue not existing, It doesn't throw any 500 exception when sending simultaneously multiple requests.
Also used following comments,
php artisan route:cache
php artisan config:cache
php artisan optimize

Confirmed.

Laravel caches configuration settings, so after editing the .env file, you must run this command: "php artisan config:cache"

this will clear the previous cache, and read your new values from the .env file to the new config cache.

The config:cache has no effect in my local environment. My local environment is not reading any variables from .env file. I am using L5.2 Any other thing I can try.

Are you using homestead/vagrant/virtualbox? I have found that homestead.yaml "global" variables over-ride variables set in .env in the project folder.

Did you ever figure this out? I'm having the same problem and none of the suggestions have worked.

Yes, I did. This is an issue, but the solution is pretty simple. Basically, the only place you ever use the getenv() or env() functions are in your config files (present in the /config/ directory). Then, you run the command php artisan config:cache which caches all those files. Then, you are only pulling your ENV variables once, upon deployment, and you won't have this issue anymore where there is a problem reading ENV variables (which is a complex issue involving more than just Laravel).

@trevorg That got it. Was having the same problem. Moved all uses of env() up into the config area only and the problem has stopped.

Yeah.. that's the problem...

1. What if I use Lumen which does not have php artisan config:cache ?

2. what if in my code there is really need for checking env?

Also affected by this, here is what we have found on this issue:

We were using Apache 2.4 with the Event MPM and a thread-safe build of PHP 7. This caused the env() method to not respond reliably - it could give you the right variable at one point in the code, then just a few rows down it would return something else. (Like the default variable which trevorg was experiencing.)

We switched to using the prefork MPM and the problems vanished instantly.

Yes, prefork sucks in terms of speed when compared to another MPM, but it seems there is some issue with the event MPM and environmental variables in Apache, PHP and/or Laravel/Lumen.

@leolam2005 Sorry for the late reply.

Not sure about Lumen, but for your second question, you will want to add whatever variable you need from your .env file into your /config/app.php file as 'secret_key' => env('SECRET_KEY') and then call config('app.secret_key') in your application.

Of course, it won't solve the issue unless you are caching the config files with the artisan config:cache command.

Yes. This issue is very frustrating. Need to run artisan config:cache every time added or updated a config variable